Book description
Blindfolding children from birth. Playing a piano made of live cats. Using tobacco to cure drowning. Wearing "flea"-coloured clothes. These actions seem odd to us but in the eighteenth century they made sense.
As Carolyn Purnell persuasively shows, while our bodies may not change dramatically, the way we think…
Why read it?
1 author picked The Sensational Past as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
The Enlightenment is often associated with intellectual changes. But the book sheds a new light on this “Age of Reason” by showing how emotions and feelings played a crucial role in this intellectually and sensorially dynamic period. Purnell tells this change by providing many interesting, and funny, episodes. My favorite, among others, is the seventeenth-century vogue for perfumes made of the excretions of the civet cat or the musk deer, and it was only in the mid-eighteenth century that floral scents became popular. This shift had to do with people’s ideas about health, cleanliness, and naturalness that changed over time.…
If you love The Sensational Past...
December on 5C4
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
Want books like The Sensational Past?
Our community of 13,000+ authors has personally recommended 100 books like The Sensational Past.
Share your top 3 reads of 2026!
And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.
181
readers submitted
so far, will you?
📚 If you like The Sensational Past, you might also like...
Sexy Selfie Nation
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
In This Together
In This Together explores how we can harness our social networks to make a real impact fighting the climate crisis. Against notions of the lone environmental crusader, Marianne E. Krasny shows us the power of "network climate action"—the idea that our own ordinary acts can influence and inspire those close…
