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The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England. By HOLLY DUGAN. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Pp. xi + 259. $62.00 cloth.
Ephemeral entered the English language in the late sixteenth century, a moment central to the historical period Holly Dugan explores in this important study of perfume and olfaction. Initially, the word referred either to daylong fevers or mayflies that had a brief diurnal life cycle; it perfectly captures the evanescence of Dugan's topic. Her history is founded on a paradox, for she focuses on recon- structing the olfactory culture of English day-to-day life that is at once materially grounded and elusively transient. As she notes, most traditional histories of per- fume begin in Egypt, migrate to Rome, and move to eighteenth-century France, ignoring medieval and Renaissance England almost completely. Concentrating on this English early modern lacuna in perfume's history, she seeks to examine the material practices of substances and phenomena that have all but vanished. This apparently quixotic project would appear to be a nightmare venture for a historical phenomenologist: how does one anatomize such a notoriously elusive topic? Yet the invisible nature of her subject paradoxically provides Dugan with a rich theo- retical reflexivity, since it necessarily questions the very enterprise of historical recreation, interrogating the nature of embodiment, epistemology in the archive, and our capacity to understand past culture. While Dugan cannot, of course, offer definitive answers to the crucial questions she poses, her study allows us to con- front productively some of the unarticulated motivations that subtend the histori- cist enterprise.
Dugan's study is shaped by historical phenomenology, a twinned concept that suggests that what-and how-we know is enabled both by bodily experience and by our historical moment. This theoretical method, molded by the philosophical legacies of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is particularly attractive to critics who make the body and the senses central to their investigations. Dugan's study of material practices is intriguingly supplemented by her consideration of human subjects-Mary Magdalen, Lady Eleanor Davies, Queen Elizabeth, among others-who simultaneously exuded odors and who inhaled the scents of their sur- round. Her examination gestures to interfaces between "scents" and the olfactory "sense," the boundaries among human subjects, and...