Sensory history is now a burgeoning field, and yet the sense of smell remains understudied and undervalued. This lack of critical attention is doubtless based on the assumption that scents are too fleeting, invisible, and intangible to have a history or an archive. Creating a material and metaphoric archive of perfume is the main goal of Holly Dugan's research. Indeed, Dugan emphasizes the role of metaphor “in both biological and cultural experiences of sensation” and recovers a lost language of sensory description wherein “objects ambered, civited, expired, fetored, halited, resented, and smeeked” (4–5). The Ephemeral History of Perfume is a groundbreaking study that fleshes out, in luxurious and engaging detail, the culture of scent in early modern England. In much the same manner as Bruce R. Smith's The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (Chicago, 1999) brought the sounds of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London to life for a host of Shakespeareans and literary scholars, Dugan's painstaking historical account of scent production, consumption, and circulation marks the vital importance of smell in ways that intelligently challenge modern assumptions.
The introduction and conclusion bracket six chapters, each of which unites a smell-dispersing object, a fragrance, and a place. This structure helpfully serves the broader argument in that it demonstrates the complexity of smell as a category, negotiating at once between subject and object positions and also defining spatial parameters. Dugan explores smell's ability to create atmospheres and to disrupt bodily boundaries for different groups of people—ranging from the king's mistresses to the natives of Virginia—raising provocative questions about how gender, race, and nationality influence smell perception. Considering six important Renaissance scents (frankincense, rosewater, sassafras, rosemary, ambergris, and jasmine), the first two chapters argue for smell's role in self-presentation, the second two link scent to medical olfaction, and the final two examine perfume as a marketable luxury.
The introduction surveys the field of historical phenomenology, provides a useful overview of early modern theories of smell, and positions its original contribution by noting that “England remains an undiscovered country within the history of olfaction” (3). Whereas most studies of perfume center on the exoticism of the Orient, Dugan purposefully addresses the place of artificial scents in the construction of English identity. The methodology of the book is to draw together a wealth of historical evidence culled from plague pamphlets, guild records, gardening manuals, anatomy treatises, recipe books, and museum collections of scented objects, and then to use these findings to shed new light on the significance of smell in canonical and noncanonical literary works. That said, I sometimes wished for more in-depth analyses of the literary texts, such as the passage on Acrasia's garden from The Faerie Queene (170), to balance out the volume's vast historical material.
Chapters 1 and 2 consider the relationship between odors and social perception. In chapter 1, Dugan historicizes the place of incense and censers in church, using the example of Richard Wyche's execution for heresy and subsequent cult of smell to illustrate how sweet perfumes implied divinity. This chapter situates smell as a hinge between religious and economic concerns, connecting the waning odor of incense in church to the rising prominence of a global spice market. Both these concerns are brought to bear on two early English plays: the Wakefield Offering of the Magi and the Digby Mary Magdalene. By contrast to the otherworldly scent of incense, rose perfumes returned smell to the body and its needs. Chapter 2 builds on the religious associations of perfuming to argue that English monarchs employed absolute rose extracts as a subtle reminder of their absolute power. Politics and erotics blend in King Henry VIII's use of rosewater to mark his court favorites. Revisiting the scent of the damask rose—first as an icon of English nationalism; second as embodied by the gardens to the south of its namesake theater, the Rose; and third as a nod to bankside prostitution at the Little Rose—Dugan interprets Shakespeare's sonnets and Romeo and Juliet's references to a “rose by any other name” in an enriched sensory register.
Chapters 3 and 4 bring together medicinal scents with English colonial rhetoric, explaining how smells endanger the body as agents of disease. The scent of sassafras, tracked by the noses of the Indian guides, became synonymous with New World exploration. Yet where aromatic sassafras was crucial to English success and used to treat syphilis, its presence in the Anglo-Indian “contact zone” (75) revealed the threat of intimate olfactory, rather than visual, technologies of discovery. While Dugan uses smell to navigate what she calls “contact” between natives and English colonizers, there is little said to acknowledge the synaesthetic nature of this interaction between smell and touch. Chapter 4 extends this consideration of threatening smells to plague and the medicinal effects of rosemary in the “shut” household. If bad odors were harbingers of death, then perfumes were deemed reliable preventives of disease.
The final two chapters evaluate the economics of perfume. Chapter 5 treats the seventeenth-century vogue for gloves oiled with ambergris as signs of social status as well as wealth. Chapter 6 links the growing interest in pleasure gardens and potpourri vases to early modern sexuality. The carefully contrived odors of the garden served as a sensual escape for city dwellers, and the cultivated smell of jasmine became a prized means of scenting indoor spaces, especially the bedroom.
As a history of perfume in England, this book is a remarkable accomplishment. Dugan offers a thorough and technical account of scent manufacture and codification in early modern England. Her book not only redresses the imbalance of sensory scholarship toward vision and hearing by bringing to light the rich history of olfaction in this period but also further interrogates the significance of scent as a marker of early modern identity. After reading this book, it is difficult to understand how smell could have been neglected for so long.
