Introduction

This introduction reviews major trends in sensory studies since the emergence of the field as an important paradigm of social, cultural, and historical investigation beginning in the early 1990s. It offers critical assessment of how these trends have impacted study of early modern Europe in particular, defined here as the period from approximately 1500 to 1700. Assessment points to the need for more detail-oriented case studies that connect global trends well developed in the scholarship with the local, day-to-day practical concerns of individuals and small groups of people who lived during the early modern centuries. The introduction stresses the need for greater attention to the ways local contexts in Europe became more and more entangled in and subject to the influence of new regional, transregional, and even global historical patterns, and the ways these changes created new opportunities and challenges for people to assert agency in the making of sensory knowledge. The introduction asserts that taking such an approach to the senses in the early modern period will better illuminate the power dynamics at play in the knowledge-making process. After addressing these issues, the introduction then outlines the individual case studies presented in each of the contributor chapters.