Intoxication of the Senses: Pleasure, Poison and Perception, 1600-present

Alternate Tuesdays, 12.00-14.00 during term time
CRASSH
Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, CB3 9DT

Tropes of sensory excess – the moral dangers of touch; the interrelation of the hedonic, medical and poisonous in drugs and perfume – are witnessed across cultures and periods. Our aim is to examine the historical and symbolic relationship between intoxication and its sensory expression, focusing on the ‘lower’ human senses of touch, taste and smell as excessive or dangerous. While the senses have long been a focus of scholarly enquiry, existing research has been confined in three ways. First, humanities scholars have tended to work within the boundaries of their particular disciplines. Second, academics have excluded the ‘lower’ senses in favour of the traditional ‘higher’ senses of sight and hearing. Removed from appetite and supposedly objective, these higher senses are perceived as durable and communicable in ways that touch, taste and smell are not. As a result, scholars have limited themselves in a third, key, way – through focusing exclusively on the ideal and ‘normal’ functioning of the senses. With an inter-disciplinary approach, we are looking at the over-stimulation or repression of both higher and lower senses through their intoxication, and hoping to find insights into questions of legality, pleasure and deviance.