At the core of smell history or the history of smell is the claim that smells and smelling are deeply historical. The ways in which people have used their noses, the meanings given to smells, and the material odours that surround people - what we can collectively call their 'smellscapes' - have all changed over time.

Take the example of plague and its histories. Seventeenth-century apothecaries sniffed out the powers of medicines in ways that are lost to the average twenty-first century pharmacist, who deals with looking at packaging and prescriptions rather than smelling herbs and spices; the scent of rosemary was associated with prophylactic protection against plague for early modern Europeans rather than being a mere flavouring for food; and the smells of urban spaces were not (or at least not only) stronger or more numerous but qualitatively different in character to those that surround us in cities today. Whilst 'organic' smells might have been common in early modern cities, today we are surrounded by the odours of air pollution, fast food, and synthetic fragrance.

Early histories of smell fleshed out the Freudian fable of a modern world that feared smells. In 1982 Alain Corbin published his hugely important work Le miasme et la jonquille: l'odorat et l'imaginaire social, XVIlle- XIXe siècles (translated into English as The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination). He argued that from the 1750s European modernity was characterised by a war on odours, motivated by medical fears of disease-inducing-miasma, that led bodies and spaces to be deodorized. When David Howes, Constance Classen, and Anthony Synnott came to write their equally groundbreaking 1994 volume, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell, they began by describing the modern world bequeathed to us by Corbin's deodorising nineteenth-century subjects: 'the sense of smell is repressed in the modern west, and its social history ignored". Aroma matched Corbin's narrative about the deodorization of the western world with a story about how, in areas such as religious life and horticulture, smell lost its significance with the arrival of modernity.

However, smell history has now moved beyond these initial narratives and begun to explore the nuance and complexity of the olfactory past. Today, the history of smell is an expanding field. Single-scent histories have recovered past perceptions of odours ranging from ambergris and civet to sulphur and the durian fruit. Books and articles have explored the smellscapes of spaces ranging from late medieval churches and Ottoman mosques to nineteenth-century American streets and twentieth-century heavy-water plants. Above all, smell history is now beginning to incorporate a variety of new methodological perspectives. Histories of smell are now beginning to drawn on insights from the environmental humanities, postcolonial literary criticism, and queer theory as new scholars began to explore the full depth and breadth of the olfactory past.