"Smell can never truly be understood through science, Muchembled argues, because it is always vulnerable to the whims of popular taste."

"In sixteenth-century France, amid religious moralizing and the pervasive fear of witchcraft, the scent of a woman’s undercarriage, once considered an ambrosial ideal, became synonymous with the occult. The stigma was worse for aging women, who became seen as olfactory ogres; Muchembled quotes the poet Joachim du Bellay’s disgust at an 'old woman older than the world / older yet than squalid filth.' Our own experience confirms that smells are subject not just to major cultural changes but also to minor shifts in context: the same smell that greets you at the door of a cheesemonger has a very different effect when confronted at the door of a porta-potty."

From "How to Make Sense of Scents/Can language ever capture the mysterious world of smells?" by Rachel Syme (in The New Yorker)(discussing "Smells: A Cultural History of Odours in Early Modern Times" by Robert Muchembled).