Meeting Points: Tactile Bodily Encounters in Rural Britain, 1840-1914

In recent years, sensory historians have begun to re-emphasise the physicality of sensation: its ‘realness’. There is disagreement amongst sensory historians about how to engage with this somatic realm of the sensory past whilst maintaining a commitment to understanding the senses as historically contingent and distant from ourselves. In this paper, I propose that the environment is a formidable analytical agent for grounding these complex conceptualisations of the senses in concrete instances of real happenings. I argue that to thoughtfully invoke the physicality and historicity of sensory experience, sensory historians must place their gaze on the relationship between bodies and their surroundings. I do so by examining a critical moment in British environmental history in which these close embodied encounters were being staged for urban audiences through the mass circulation of weekly travel magazines and guidebooks. Due to developments in transport technology, these texts were no longer aimed at ‘armchair travellers’ but written for an involved readership who could imitate the practices they read about. In this paper I explore the ways these writings made embodiment visible in a new way and are a key cultural artefact in the history of the senses.

Keywords: Meeting Points: Tactile Bodily Encounters in Rural Britain, 1840-1914

Faheem Hussain (Institute of Education, University College London, UK)

Making sense of sensory encounters in Al-Andalus (Spain)

Emerging trends in the study of the past call for a multi-disciplinary and sensory approach that can provide a textured understanding of the everyday lives of people. This approach can also provide sensory entry points to situate Muslims and their experiences within the complex social, geographical, political, religious, and economic landscape of the early modern world. This paper will focus on the sensory encounters between Muslim and Christian communities of Al-Andalus in the Mediterranean region through food and the sensory experiences associated with that. By analyzing sources from history, literature, material culture and cookbooks the paper examines everyday life and human interactions that take place around/through activities such as that of agriculture and cooking. The layers of political complexities, evolving communities and religious boundaries are explored through the case study of ‘Moriscos’. The paper argues that culinary choices were integrally linked to the evolving identity from ‘Muslim to Moriscos’ in the region. Through exploring the historical and political dimensions of senses the paper sheds light on the constructed and contested nature of these identities. The study presents humanistic dimensions to the study of the past and provides unique insights into the intercultural dynamics and lived experiences of the early modern Mediterranean world.
Keywords: Sensory history, Andalusia, Muslim past, food histories

Michael (Mike) E.S. Emett ∆ (Independent Scholar)

The Flora and Fauna of Reconciliation

Hundreds of Northerners gathered in Charleston, South Carolina, in early April 1865 to witness Robert Anderson returning to Fort Sumter with the very flag lowered in evacuation four years earlier. For many of these arrivals, this was the first time they entered the “cradle of secession,” becoming enthralled by the climate, fauna, devastation, and varied artifacts to collect. As the tourists combed urban wreckage and interacted with locals, the city’s flowers garnered a prominent feature in the records of several people. While many took back home as many as they could carry, others wove specific fauna onto the stage within Fort Sumter. In utilizing the History of Experience, senses and emotions help us unpack these flowery artifacts as the Northern means to present to the defeated South colorful and fragrant olive branches of peace, reconciliation, unity, and hopes for a stronger America. As the American flag rose again and Rev. Henry Ward Beecher gave Lincoln-approved words of the pending peace and Reconstruction, this experience was crowned with symbolic and informative foliage lost hours later from the horror of assassination. This paper recovers the fauna and their meanings for, at the least, the Civil War Era.
Keywords: Senses, flowers, Civil War-Charleston, memory, reconciliation