The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England

by Holly Dugan

In contrast to the other senses, smell has long been thought of as too elusive, too fleeting for traditional historical study. Holly Dugan disagrees, arguing that there are rich accounts documenting how men and women produced, consumed, and represented perfumes and their ephemeral effects. She delves deeply into the cultural archive of olfaction to explore what a sense of smell reveals about everyday life in early modern England. In this book, Dugan focuses on six important scents―incense, rose, sassafras, rosemary, ambergris, and jasmine. She links these smells to the unique spaces they inhabited―churches, courts, contact zones, plague-ridden households, luxury markets, and pleasure gardens―and the objects used to dispense them. This original approach provides a rare opportunity to study how early modern men and women negotiated the environment in their everyday lives and the importance of smell to their daily actions. Dugan defines perfume broadly to include spices, flowers, herbs, animal parts, trees, resins, and other ingredients used to produce artificial scents, smokes, fumes, airs, balms, powders, and liquids. In researching these Renaissance aromas, Dugan uncovers the extraordinary ways, now largely lost, that people at the time spoke and wrote about objects “ambered, civited, expired, fetored, halited, resented, and smeeked” or were described as “breathful, embathed, endulced, gracious, halited, incensial, odorant, pulvil, redolent, and suffite.” A unique contribution to early modern studies, The Ephemeral History of Perfume is an unparalleled study of olfaction in the Renaissance, a period in which new scents and important cultural theories about smell were developed. Dugan’s inspired analysis of a wide range of underexplored sources makes available to scholars a remarkable wealth of information on the topic.

Genres: History

280 pages, Hardcover

First published September 14, 2011

About the author

Holly Dugan is Associate Professor of English at the George Washington University. She is the author of The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England (2011), and co-editor with Lara Farina (West Virginia University) of Intimate Senses, a special issue of Postmedieval (2012). She has written numerous articles on the role of smell in early modern literature and culture; she is currently working on Shakespeare and the Senses, a book that explores the sensory realms of early modern English theatres.

Reviews

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've had my eye on this book for a while, as I kept running into people I admire who were recommending and citing it, and I'm delighted that I finally made time for it.

This stunning work on the history not just of perfume as we would define it today but of scent as a marker of prestige, as a sign of global trade, and as an influence with ramifications for the early modern bodies combines profound and wide-ranging research with provocative insights about the ways that scents influenced and were influenced by the changing English culture. While I do not necessarily agree with all of Dugan's conclusions and interpretations, her work adds significantly to the history of the senses, and it was even a pleasurable read.

[Ben Peperkamp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dr. Kristine Steenbergh is pleased to invite you to a lecture on a synaesthetic approach to sensory history. Holly Dugan will talk about her research into early modern English pomanders and the smell of old books on Friday 28 February 2014. Come smell the historical odours of pomander and ambergris, with a brief introduction to her collection of historical odours by Rijksmuseum curator and olfactory art historian Caro Verbeek. More info: http://literatuurensamenleving.nl/?p=....