Introduction—Thinking History with All the Senses
When Christopher Columbus set foot on the island of Guanahaní in 1492, he was struck not only by the novelty of the land but also by the very act of seeing. He described the “lovely trees” and the “friendly people” he encountered—a panorama of visual impressions that were immediately given meaning. The beauty of the landscape seemed to prove its fertility, while the inhabitants‘ nakedness appeared to signify both innocence and governability. What began as a sensory impression became part of a narrative that legitimised possession and mission.[1]

This scene raises a crucial question: In what ways can established theories of historical meaning help us to understand the sensory aspects of experience? The following brings together the renowned historians Jörn Rüsen and Reinhart Koselleck, who demonstrate that their models implicitly incorporate a way of thinking about perception as part of historical sense-making. Both conceptualise how humans orient themselves in time, and I suggest that this orientation is always embodied and sensory.
Columbus’s account serves as an analytical prism. His narrative reveals how perception becomes theory-laden at the moment of encounter. Vision, sound and even smell do not operate as neutral data but as organising principles of historical sense. In short, I would argue that Columbus’s report becomes legible once two sets of categories are applied: Rüsen’s aesthetic and psychic dimensions of meaning and Koselleck’s pair of experience and expectation.[2]
With Rüsen, the passage illustrates how sensory impressions provide the affective charge—the lustre—that gives narrative its orienting power. With Koselleck, this moment transformed into an experiential space that shapes a horizon of expectation. It also stabilises meaning through asymmetrical counter-concepts, such as civilised/uncivilised, pure/foul and bright/dark, which translate perception into an enduring semantic order.
Moving beyond the primacy of sight, Columbus takes in the smells, sounds, and textures around him: the scent of unfamiliar plants, the rhythm of distant drums, and the smoothness of the sand beneath his feet. These fleeting details remind us that historical meaning emerges long before words are written—in the body, perception, and senses.
How We Make History Meaningful: Jörn Rüsen
According to Jörn Rüsen, the creation of meaning is the fundamental process of historical thought. People tell stories about the past to make sense of time, linking their lived experience to their expectations of the future.[3] Through narrative, the flux of events becomes a temporal order connecting the ‘was’, the ‘is’, and the ‚will be‘.
His typology of traditional, exemplary, critical, and genetic narratives shows how the same perception can have different meanings depending on its narrative form.[4] For example, a smell may confirm tradition, prove a rule, challenge expectations, or signal transformation. Therefore, sensory data are (prefigured) experiences that are awaiting narrative interpretation.
Rüsen’s view that meaning-making exceeds the cognitive is what makes him crucial for sensory history. Alongside the logical and moral dimensions, he identifies the aesthetic, or the lustre of the narrative, and the psychic, or the power of affect.[5] For him, meaning is not just conceptual order but also the effect that history has on the imagination and the body.
This move opens up the theory to the realm of experience, as something felt and embodied. The aesthetic and the affective mark the point at which impressions—sound, colour, texture, and odour—enter historical orientation. Rüsen thus provides a conceptual link through which sensory history can be seen as an extension of historical sense-making.
Columbus’s description illustrates this dynamic. His impressions are not merely described; they construct an atmosphere. The emotional impact of his words provides orientation before interpretation. Here, perception becomes argument: the sensory field establishes meaning. As Rüsen reminds us, historical sense-making is unthinkable without the senses.
Between Seeing and Interpreting: Koselleck’s Space of Experience
Reinhart Koselleck took a different approach to historical experience. For him, the past and the future are connected by the tension between the „space of experience“ and the „horizon of expectation“.[6] Every present moment is shaped by what has been experienced while being influenced by what is anticipated.
Within this framework, sensory perception plays a dual role. Firstly, it belongs to the realm of experience because it records what people have seen, heard, or felt. However, these impressions also shape expectations because they imbue future encounters with meaning. When early modern writers described strange sounds or odours as “wild” or “threatening”, they were creating categories that would influence later perceptions. The sensory field thus becomes a reservoir of expectations.
Koselleck also demonstrated that temporality is multilayered. Perceptions have their own duration: for example, an image or smell may persist for centuries, long after the order that produced it has disappeared.[7] Sensory meanings operate within a slowtemporality that outlasts political change.
Equally important is his notion of asymmetrical counter-concepts—binary pairs such as light/dark or pure/foul that structure historical semantics.[8] Such oppositions stabilise difference and translate fleeting impressions into enduring orders. In colonial discourse, for example, they provided the framework through which power and civility were expressed.
These semantic grids often outlive their original contexts. The concept of “foul air” and the “noise” of the unfamiliar are not merely descriptive residues but enduring sensory codes that continue to influence expectations of the world. Koselleck’s “spaces of experience” are therefore not purely linguistic; they are imbued with perception and emotion.
From Impression to Concept
When Rüsen and Koselleck are considered together, a productive tension emerges rather than an opposition. Rüsen examines how meaning is organised within narratives, while Koselleck explores how it is stabilised semantically. Rüsen starts with the body and imagination as the origins of meaning, while Koselleck traces the linguistic and temporal forms that give meaning endurance.
Together, they help us to understand how sensory impressions evolve from perception to concept. This is where sensory history finds its anchor: in the transition from embodied perception to historical intelligibility. Smells, sounds, or colours are first registered in emotion, then gain orientation in narrative and permanence in language. The senses thus form the link between experience and expectation, and between story and structure.
Writing a history of the senses therefore involves studying how perception becomes meaning and how sensory life enters historical consciousness.
From Seeing to Meaning: Columbus Revisited
It is no coincidence that Columbus describes the islands primarily in terms of what he saw. In the European tradition, vision was considered the “highest” sense and was associated with truth.[9] However, his account does more than merely observe; it translates perception into meaning.
The beauty of the landscape becomes proof of fertility, while the nakedness of the inhabitants is seen as a sign of innocence and subjugability. Through this logic, Columbus transforms experience into order—precisely the process theorised by Rüsen and Koselleck.

With Rüsen, the episode exemplifies the aesthetic dimension of sense-making, with vivid imagery creating an emotional landscape that guides the observer.[10] In contrast with Koselleck, it demonstrates how perception solidifies into semantics, with the binaries ‘civilised/uncivilised’ and ‘pure/foul’ reflecting his asymmetrical counter-concepts, thereby shaping future expectations.[11]
Crucially, Columbus’s text also evokes other senses, such as the scent of flowers, the rhythm of drums and the texture of the soil.[12] These fleeting perceptions demonstrate that colonial meaning was multisensory from the outset. Seeing, smelling, and hearing were orchestrated to structure the affective and cognitive grammar of the encounter.
Consequently, his report is thus more than just a travel account; it is a microcosm of sense-making where perception and narration converge. Here, the senses here are not merely ornamental but constitute the history’s intelligibility.
Sensing before Speaking
When read together through the lens of the senses, Rüsen and Koselleck demonstrate that history is not only recounted or conceived of—it is also experienced. Before words take form, meaning begins in perception. Smells, sounds, textures and colours create a pre-conceptual layer of awareness—the proto-structures of sense-making.
It is here that the two theorists converge. Rüsen emphasises affect and imagination as the conditions of orientation, while Koselleck traces how these impressions evolve into concepts and temporal frameworks.[13] What is felt becomes narratively ordered and semantically stabilised. The senses do not replace narrative or semantics; rather, they precede and sustain them. Rüsen demonstrates how affective impressions acquire orientation through narrative form, while Koselleck illustrates how such forms endure through semantics. Together they redefine historical sense-making as an embodied process.
The sensory is not opposed to the historical but is rather its precondition. Through the senses, experience acquires direction, and through narrative and concepts, it gains duration. Thinking about history with all the senses reveals that meaning arises not only from discourse but also from contact, atmosphere, and emotion.
More than Ornament: What the Senses Teach Us
Sensory history reminds us that historical experience is always embodied and that any interpretation is incomplete without this awareness. Tracking the evolution of the senses throughout history reveals that the very categories through which we interpret the past were once experienced and perceived.
Columbus’s account is just one example of how sensory perception—the shimmer of colour, the rhythm of sound and the scent of the unknown—has always been interwoven with ideas of civility, purity, and order. Wherever the senses are present, history takes form—and with it, meaning.
Viewed in this way, sensory history is not merely an ornamental addition but a theoretical lens. It demonstrates how perception, affect, and imagination shape historical meaning long before it is fixed in language by concepts and narratives. Its aim is modest yet profound: to reveal how the world of experience gives rise to the world of thought. In this sense, it also reminds us that the historian’s work begins not with abstraction, but with perception—with listening, seeing, and feeling—before it ever reaches the page.
[1] Christopher Columbus, Logbook (Las Casas transcript), in Das Bordbuch des Christoph Kolumbus, trans. by Stephanie Fleischmann, ed. Stefan Rinke (Freiburg: Herder, 2025), 95–98; 275–284; and Letter to Santángel (1493), trans. by Cecil Jane, Early Americas Digital Archive, 2003 (n. pag.), https://eada.lib.umd.edu/text-entries/columbus-letter-to-santangel/ (last accessed 22 September 2025).
[2] Jörn Rüsen, Historische Sinnbildung. Grundlagen, Formen, Entwicklungen, 2020, 41–46; Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 211–218, 349–355.
[3] Rüsen, Historische Sinnbildung. Grundlagen, Formen, Entwicklungen, 13-15.
[4] Rüsen, Historische Sinnbildung. Grundzüge einer Historik I, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983), 60–67.
[5] Rüsen, Historische Sinnbildung. Grundlagen, Formen, Entwicklungen, 41–46.
[6] Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten,211–218, 350–355.
[7] Reinhart Koselleck, Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 17–22.
[8] Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, 211–218.
[9] Constance Classen, The Deepest Sense. A Cultural History of Touch, (Urbana/Chicago:University of Illinois Press, 2012),1–10.
[10] Koselleck, Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik, 41–46.
[11] Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten211–218; 350–355.
[12] Christopher Columbus, Logbook (Las Casas transcript), in: Rinke/Fleischmann 2025, pp. 95–274; Letter to Santángel (1493), trans. by Cecil Jane, Early Americas Digital Archive, 2003 (n. pag.), https://eada.lib.umd.edu/text-entries/columbus-letter-to-santangel/ (last accessed 22 September 2025); and Letter on the First Voyage (1493), ed. Kendall Johnson, University of Hong Kong, n.d. (n. pag.), https://english.hku.hk/staff/kjohnson/columbusletter.html (last accessed 22 September 2025).
[12] ibid.
[13] Rüsen, Historische Sinnbildung. Grundlagen, Formen, Entwicklungen, 41–46; Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, 211–218.
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nemos (November 9, 2025). From Senses to Sense: Theories of Historical Experience and Sensory History. NEMoS. Retrieved December 14, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/154b2