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Abstract
This dissertation argues that there is an archive of early modern olfaction and that it provides a rich account of early modern materiality, the history of the body, and cultural experiences of embodiment. Early modern men and women, like modern men and women, understood themselves and the culture of every day life through their bodily senses, including the sense of smell. Of all the senses, smell is usually understood as the most base, the most ephemeral, and thus the most resistant to traditional historical methodologies. Only very recently have scientists discovered how the human body recognizes and remembers over 10,000 different smells. Yet, smell's role in the past remains a mystery, virtually ignored in historical scholarship. Implicitly, this makes sense: early modern smells, and any meanings they once held, surely must have faded long ago. I argue, however, that unlike other material objects lost to the historical record, smells were always conceived as ephemeral, invisible objects. Scent thus provides a unique methodological opportunity to expand understanding of historical relationships between the histories of the body, as a material entity, and the senses, as embodied, phenomenological responses to the material world.
Despite understandings of scents as object-less, fleeting, and illusive, there are substantial archives documenting how early modern men and women produced, consumed and represented scents and their bodily effects. Each chapter analyzes the production, consumption, and representation of scents in one of four locations: the stage, the market, the sickroom, and the pleasure garden. Surveying a wide variety of evidence, I analyze literary texts such as the Digby Mary Magdalene, Shakespeare's Antony & Cleopatra, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Twelfth Night, Philip Massinger's The Renegado, Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women, book three of Spenser's Faerie Queene, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Margaret Cavendish's Convent of Pleasure alongside texts and objects, including manuscript and printed cookbooks, guild records, herbals, medical anatomies, gardening manuals, censers, gloves, pomanders, and potpourri vases. This cultural history of scent thus elucidates how early modern men and women understood—and navigated—the invisible, odiferous environments that circulated between, around, and inside their bodies. The cultural history of perfume demonstrate how early modern men and women comprehended the boundaries between their bodies and the material environments of their everyday lives.
