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While vision did play an important role in the understanding of both the macaroni as a phenomenon and the pleasure garden as a space, to focus on vision, to the exclusion of other senses and embodiment, is to miss an important means of understanding both macaronis and pleasure gardens. We must understand the pleasure gardens and macaronis as multi-sensory. In particular, I show that olfaction was a crucial means of understanding the macaroni’s place within the pleasure gardens. Pleasure gardens were a place of sensory pleasures and dangers where one was expected to, and attempted to, cultivate one’s senses in particular ways. Macaronis were frequently described in terms of their perfumes and essences, and yet none of the extensive work on macaronis has interrogated this.”
The Macaroni’s ‘Ambrosial Essences’: Perfume, Identity and Public Space in Eighteenth-Century England. TULLETT, W. (2014), is awaiting publication in the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Further info: on Macaroni here at Wikipedia.
Note: “The place or exact nature of the ‘Macaroni Club’, which Horace Walpole first described in February 1764, has been the subject of much speculation but has yielded no firm evidence or answers.”
Also see: Heidegger meets Macaroni in New York State (which came first, the macaroni or the hole?)
Previous article: The smell of macaroni [part 2]
This concludes our short series on the smell of macaroni.