Taste and the Ancient Senses

Taste and the Ancient Senses PDF Author: Kelli C. Rudolph
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781844658688
Category : Classical literature, Hellenistic
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Taste and the Ancient Senses explores the use of taste metaphors in Graeco-Roman literature, which provides us with a window into their own theorising about taste. The values and meaning of tastes, food and eating are also revealed through cultural practices and habits which are accessible to us through the literary, historical and material record.

Taste and the Ancient Senses

Taste and the Ancient Senses PDF Author: Kelli C. Rudolph
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781844658688
Category : Classical literature, Hellenistic
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Taste and the Ancient Senses explores the use of taste metaphors in Graeco-Roman literature, which provides us with a window into their own theorising about taste. The values and meaning of tastes, food and eating are also revealed through cultural practices and habits which are accessible to us through the literary, historical and material record.

Taste and the Ancient Senses

Taste and the Ancient Senses PDF Author: Kelli C. Rudolph
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317515404
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
Olives, bread, meat and wine: it is deceptively easy to evoke ancient Greece and Rome through a few items of food and drink. But how were their tastes different from ours? How did they understand the sense of taste itself, in relation to their own bodies and to other modes of sensory experience? This volume, the first of its kind to explore the ancient sense of taste, draws on the literature, philosophy, history and archaeology of Greco-Roman antiquity to provide answers to these central questions. By surveying and probing the literary and material remains from the Archaic period to late antiquity, contributors investigate the cultural and intellectual development towards attitudes and theories about taste. These specially commissioned chapters also open a window onto ancient thinking about perception and the body. Importantly, these authors go beyond exploring the functional significance of taste to uncover its value and meaning in the actions, thoughts and words of the Greeks and Romans. Taste and the Ancient Senses presents a full range of interpretative approaches to the gustatory sense, and provides an indispensable resource for students and scholars of classical antiquity and sensory studies.

Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses

Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses PDF Author: Shane Butler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317547144
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Like us, the ancient Greeks and Romans came to know and understand the world through their senses. Yet sensory experience has rarely been considered in the study of antiquity and, when the senses are examined, sight is regularly privileged. 'Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses' presents a radical reappraisal of antiquity's textures, flavours, and aromas, sounds and sights. It offers both a fresh look at society in the ancient world and an opportunity to deepen the reading of classical literature. The book will appeal to readers in classical society and literature, philosophy and cultural history. All Greek and Latin is translated and technical matters are explained for the non-specialist. The introduction sets the ancient senses within the history of aesthetics and the subsequent essays explores the senses throughout the classical period and on to the modern reception of classical literature.

The Routledge Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East

The Routledge Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East PDF Author: Kiersten Neumann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100043642X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 770

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Book Description
This Handbook is a state-of-the-field volume containing diverse approaches to sensory experience, bringing to life in an innovative, remarkably vivid, and visceral way the lives of past humans through contributions that cover the chronological and geographical expanse of the ancient Near East. It comprises thirty-two chapters written by leading international contributors that look at the ways in which humans, through their senses, experienced their lives and the world around them in the ancient Near East, with coverage of Anatolia, Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Persia, from the Neolithic through the Roman period. It is organised into six parts related to sensory contexts: Practice, production, and taskscape; Dress and the body; Ritualised practice and ceremonial spaces; Death and burial; Science, medicine, and aesthetics; and Languages and semantic fields. In addition to exploring what makes each sensory context unique, this organisation facilitates cross-cultural and cross-chronological, as well as cross-sensory and multisensory comparisons and discussions of sensory experiences in the ancient world. In so doing, the volume also enables considerations of senses beyond the five-sense model of Western philosophy (sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell), including proprioception and interoception, and the phenomena of synaesthesia and kinaesthesia. The Routledge Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East provides scholars and students within the field of ancient Near Eastern studies new perspectives on and conceptions of familiar spaces, places, and practices, as well as material culture and texts. It also allows scholars and students from adjacent fields such as Classics and Biblical Studies to engage with this material, and is a must-read for any scholar or student interested in or already engaged with the field of sensory studies in any period.

Making Sense of Taste

Making Sense of Taste PDF Author: Carolyn Korsmeyer
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 080147132X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Taste, perhaps the most intimate of the five senses, has traditionally been considered beneath the concern of philosophy, too bound to the body, too personal and idiosyncratic. Yet, in addition to providing physical pleasure, eating and drinking bear symbolic and aesthetic value in human experience, and they continually inspire writers and artists. Carolyn Korsmeyer explains how taste came to occupy so low a place in the hierarchy of senses and why it is deserving of greater philosophical respect and attention. Korsmeyer begins with the Greek thinkers who classified taste as an inferior, bodily sense; she then traces the parallels between notions of aesthetic and gustatory taste that were explored in the formation of modern aesthetic theories. She presents scientific views of how taste actually works and identifies multiple components of taste experiences. Turning to taste's objects—food and drink—she looks at the different meanings they convey in art and literature as well as in ordinary human life and proposes an approach to the aesthetic value of taste that recognizes the representational and expressive roles of food. Korsmeyer's consideration of art encompasses works that employ food in contexts sacred and profane, that seek to whet the appetite and to keep it at bay; her selection of literary vignettes ranges from narratives of macabre devouring to stories of communities forged by shared eating.

Smell and the Ancient Senses

Smell and the Ancient Senses PDF Author: Mark Bradley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317565827
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
From flowers and perfumes to urban sanitation and personal hygiene, smell—a sense that is simultaneously sublime and animalistic—has played a pivotal role in western culture and thought. Greek and Roman writers and thinkers lost no opportunity to connect the smells that bombarded their senses to the social, political and cultural status of the individuals and environments that they encountered: godly incense and burning sacrifices, seductive scents, aromatic cuisines, stinking bodies, pungent farmyards and festering back-streets. The cultural study of smell has largely focused on pollution, transgression and propriety, but the olfactory sense came into play in a wide range of domains and activities: ancient medicine and philosophy, religion, botany and natural history, erotic literature, urban planning, dining, satire and comedy—where odours, aromas, scents and stenches were rich and versatile components of the ancient sensorium. The first comprehensive introduction to the role of smell in the history, literature and society of classical antiquity, Smell and the Ancient Senses explores and probes the ways that the olfactory sense can contribute to our perceptions of ancient life, behaviour, identity and morality.

Senses of the Empire

Senses of the Empire PDF Author: Eleanor Betts
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317057287
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
The Roman empire afforded a kaleidoscope of sensations. Through a series of multisensory case studies centred on people, places, buildings and artefacts, and on specific aspects of human behaviour, this volume develops ground-breaking methods and approaches for sensory studies in Roman archaeology and ancient history. Authors explore questions such as: what it felt like, and symbolised, to be showered with saffron at the amphitheatre; why the shape of a dancer’s body made him immediately recognisable as a social outcast; how the dramatic gestures, loud noises and unforgettable smells of a funeral would have different meanings for members of the family and for bystanders; and why feeling the weight of a signet ring on his finger contributed to a man’s sense of identity. A multisensory approach is taken throughout, with each chapter exploring at least two of the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. The contributors’ individual approaches vary, reflecting the possibilities and the wide application of sensory studies to the ancient world. Underlying all chapters is a conviction that taking a multisensory approach enriches our understanding of the Roman empire, but also an awareness of the methodological problems encountered when reconstructing past experiences.

Making Senses of the Past

Making Senses of the Past PDF Author: Jo Day
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809332876
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
Since the nineteenth century, museums have kept their artifacts in glass cases to better preserve them, and drawings and photographs have become standard ways of presenting the past. These practices have led to an archaeology dominated by visual description, even though human interaction with the surrounding world involves the whole body and all of its senses. In the past few years, sensory archaeology has become more prominent, and Making Senses of the Past is one of the first collected volumes on this subject. This book presents cutting-edge research on new theoretical issues. The essays presented here take readers on a multisensory journey around the world and across time. In ancient Peru, a site provides sensory surprises as voices resound beneath the ground and hidden carvings slowly reveal their secrets. In Canada and New Zealand, the flicker of reflected light from a lake dances on the faces of painted rocks and may have influenced when and why the pigment was applied. In Mesopotamia, vessels for foodstuffs build a picture of a past cuisine that encompasses taste and social activity in the building of communities. While perfume and flowers are examined in various cultures, in the chamber tombs of ancient Roman Palestine, we are reminded that not all smells are pleasant. Making Senses of the Past explores alternative ways to perceive past societies and offers a new way of wiring archaeology that incorporates the senses.

The Invention of Taste

The Invention of Taste PDF Author: Luca Vercelloni
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000183572
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
The Invention of Taste provides a detailed overview of the development of taste, from ancient times to the present. At the heart of the book is an intriguing question: why did the sensory attribute of human taste become a social metaphor and aesthetic value for judging cultural qualities of art, fashion, cuisine and other social constructions? Unique amongst the senses, taste is at once a biologically derived sense, private, personal and individual, yet also a sensibility which can be acquired, shared, and communicated. Exploring the many factors that defined the evolution of taste – from medieval morals and medicine to social and cultural philosophy, the rise of aesthetics, birth of fashion, branding trends, and luxury worship in the age of mass consumption – Luca Vercelloni’s ambitious text provides readers with an outstanding introduction to the subject, making it the cultural history of taste.Now available for the first time in English, Taste features a new final chapter and a preface by series editor David Howes. Rich in detail and examples, this interdisciplinary work is an important read for students and researchers in sensory studies, philosophy, sociology and cultural studies, as well as gastronomy, fashion, design, and branding.

The Taste of Ethnographic Things

The Taste of Ethnographic Things PDF Author: Paul Stoller
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812203143
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
Anthropologists who have lost their senses write ethnographies that are often disconnected from the worlds they seek to portray. For most anthropologists, Stoller contends, tasteless theories are more important than the savory sauces of ethnographic life. That they have lost the smells, sounds, and tastes of the places they study is unfortunate for them, for their subjects, and for the discipline itself. The Taste of Ethnographic Things describes how, through long-term participation in the lives of the Songhay of Niger, Stoller eventually came to his senses. Taken together, the separate chapters speak to two important and integrated issues. The first is methodological—all the chapters demonstrate the rewards of long-term study of a culture. The second issue is how he became truer to the Songhay through increased sensual awareness.