Reading a historical smell source

• How SmellBook uses historical sources
• Garlic and Spanish cooking in an 1858 French travel essay (CLM-GARLIC-002)
• Incense outside Valencia Cathedral in La barraca (CLM-INCENSE-002)

1. Open the two claims. For each, find the source, its holding institution, the digitised copy and the locator (a page for the 1858 essay, a chapter for the 1901 novel).
2. Follow the locator to the digitised copy and find the passage. Note why one is cited by page and the other by chapter.
3. Compare SmellBook's wording with the passage: what is kept, what is left out, and why SmellBook writes its own wording and reproduces no passage from a source.
4. Read the period and its basis. Both rest on the publication date: discuss what that can and cannot say about the time described.
5. Discuss the novel: why its claim must say it is a novel, and what a depiction can show about how a smell was written about.

• What would it take to say anything about how the square outside Valencia Cathedral smells today?
• Why does a catalogue record prove that a source exists but not what it says?
• Which details in a source would let you narrow the period beyond its publication date?

A one-paragraph source note for one claim: what the source is, where the passage is, what it supports and what it does not.

Seminar guides are free, like all of SmellBook Learn. They are suggestions for lecturers, built only from what SmellBook already publishes; they are not a curriculum and not tied to any university, programme or partner.