The city and the senses : urban culture since 1500

This collection of studies, published in the Ashgate Historical Urban Studies series, edited by Richard Rodger and Jean-Luc Pinol, examines ‘urban experience’ though the medium of the five senses: smell, hearing, vision, touch and taste. It draws on a broad range of disciplines, including history, art history, literary criticism, cultural geography and socio-linguistics and brings together young and established scholars from the UK, Ireland and the United States. Editorial responsibility was shared equally with Jill Steward, along with the writing of the introduction, which sets the detailed studies within a theoretical and historiographical context and poses issues for debate. The book contains a single-authored article by Cowan, ‘Not carrying out the vile and mechanical arts: Touch as a measure of social distinction in early modern Venice’. Some of the articles were specially commissioned for this volume. Others were developed from papers given at the International Urban History Conference in Venice in 1998, at a session organised by the Northumbria Research Group for European Urban Culture.