Sensing the Street

It is our senses that connect us to places – that root us to them – and through which we understand them. In a much-quoted definition of the reciprocal nature of places and the senses, anthropologist Steven Feld argues that ‘as place is sensed, senses are placed; as places make sense, senses make place’. Understanding the early modern street, then, demands an experiential engagement with its materiality, and a detailed and sensitive analysis of the evidence we have for early modern responses to it – why, how, where and for what reasons were sensory perceptions of street life discussed by the men and women who walked through early modern communities? This chapter outlines some of the directions that scholarship has taken to engage with how senses and street culture shaped one another, and it suggests directions for future work.