Few genres of historical research have been quite so productive these days as that genre known as affective history, and the sub-genre that often goes by the name of the history of the senses. The remarks of a historian who has accomplished more than many in this territory, Alain Corbin, offer a typical assessment of the genre at the present time. Readers of Corbin's work, particularly his history of smell in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, could not have been surprised when the historian dedicated himself to a prolegomena towards – as his title indicates – “a history and anthropology of the senses.” What is surprising from a historian whose work has made significant inroads into the practical realization of such a project is the ambivalence that Corbin bears towards it.