ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines some of the directions that scholarship has taken to engage with how senses and street culture shaped one another, and suggests directions for future work. The relationship between buildings and streets is a key determinant of the sensory qualities of urban life, and Europe had many different configurations that allowed sound to move in both directions. Informal, unofficial singing also had political impact, for instance the anti-Huguenot song forbidden in the streets of Paris ‘on pain of hanging’. Interest in the street culture was constant in this period, and visual and literary traditions developed as artists and writers experimented with perspective, observed plebeian bodies and enjoyed artistic licence. In particular, the crowded streets of people getting on with their everyday activities were enervating, and the noise, colour, movement, joy and misery of the street became of increasing interest by the end of the period.
