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    The Sensational Past: How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses
    The Sensational Past: How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses
    The Sensational Past: How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Sensational Past: How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses

    Written by Carolyn Purnell

    Narrated by Liz Thompson

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch-as they were celebrated during the Enlightenment and as they are perceived today. Blindfolding children from birth? Playing a piano made of live cats? Using tobacco to cure drowning? Wearing "flea"-colored clothes? These actions may seem odd to us, but in the eighteenth century, they made perfect sense. As often as we use our senses, we rarely stop to think about their place in history. But perception is not dependent on the body alone. Carolyn Purnell persuasively shows that, while our bodies may not change dramatically, the way we think about the senses and put them to use has been rather different over the ages. Journeying through the past three hundred years, Purnell explores how people used their senses in ways that might shock us now. And perhaps more surprisingly, she shows how many of our own ways of life are a legacy of this earlier time. Author bio: Carolyn Purnell received her PhD from the University of Chicago. She is a history instructor, an interior design writer, and a lover of bizarre facts. This is her first book.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJul 28, 2017
    ISBN9781501968921
    The Sensational Past: How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses

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