Throughout the Middle Ages and across a staggering variety of sources, both the notion of smell and the olfactory sense responsible for smells’ discernment have been put through an exegetical, doctrinal, and mystical wringer by scores of philosophers, physicians and theologians. Ephemeral and fleeting but emotionally, spiritually, and physiologically potent, olfaction was deeply embedded in humoral, anatomical, and cognitive theories. Odors could heal and odors could harm; they could purify and they could taint.
A recent volume of Convivium, titled Scent and Sense, explores those images and objects that take smells as their predicates, directing the inquiry on their tropological and often paradoxical meanings, and on their place in the medieval economy of remembrance and reflection. Elina Gertsman, Distinguished University Professor and the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Art History and Art, edited this volume, which gathers essays drawing from several religious cultures of the global medieval world—Buddhist, Jewish, Christian (both western and eastern), Islamic—and offers a broad temporal span of several centuries.
In this volume, authors engage with visual production of different kinds: from objects that emit smell to the representation of such objects, from monumental architectural structures and liturgical furnishings to illuminated miniatures in codices and paintings from palm-leaf manuscripts. All share an interest in the theoretical and metaphorical underpinnings of the olfactory sense, but all are thoroughly anchored in the material universe of the medieval cultural ecosystem. Scent and Sense, thus, takes a holistic approach to its subject, crossing religions, territories, and media of the medieval world writ large; its inquiry, nevertheless, is tightly focused on the multivalent relationships between olfaction, material culture and remembrance that manifest themselves along an extraordinarily varied spectrum of thought. Rooted equally in ritual and knowledge, metaphysically potent yet making a claim for absolute truth, the sensorial ephemera studied in this volume exists on the brink, infused with fraught self-contradictions, tethered to the divine but—like any memory—inherently untrustworthy.