Convivium 12.1 (2025)

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. 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. Essays draw from several religious cultures of the global medieval world—Buddhist, Jewish, Christian (both western and eastern), Islamic—and offer a broad temporal span of several centuries. 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 eco-system. 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 exist on the brink, infused with fraught self-contradictions, tethered to the divine but—like any memory—inherently untrustworthy.

Introduction

Elina Gertsman, “Not like Poison”. Scent and Sense in Medieval Material Culture

Articles

Adam Bursi, Columns of Scent. Perfumed Signs of the Prophet Muḥammad in Early Islamic Spaces

Sonya Rhie Mace, Scent of the Blue Nun. Utpalavarṇā in Palm-Leaf Manuscripts of Medieval India

Elisabeth Sobieczky, “and my breath was refreshed by the pleasant fragrance of the Lord” Mnemonic Functions of Image, Word, and Scent in the Freudenstadt Lectern

Reed O’Mara, Sensation and Olfaction: Experiencing Image and Text in the Golden Haggadah

Tera Lee Hedrick, Breath and Fire. Incense and Sanctification in the Late Byzantine Liturgy