Smells by Robert Muchembled

Author:Robert Muchembled [Muchembled, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2020-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

Perfumed rituals

In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, the terrible smell of plague patients led their carers to put up multiple barriers of scent between them. Though perfumes per se were harshly condemned by numerous moralists who saw them as nothing more than erotic traps worn mainly by women to catch the unwary, they came into general use when epidemics broke out, as they frequently did. Doctors and their patients saw perfumes as the sole weapon in their armoury against the Black Death, all sharing a belief in the disease’s demonic origin described by Martin Luther, who wrote that evil spirits ‘poisoned the air or otherwise infected the poor people by their breath and injected the mortal poison into their bodies’. Perfumes were used to strengthen and stimulate the individual’s own physical and spiritual defences. They were also a source of pleasure: doctors advised adding enjoyable smells to the powerful, even nauseating, bases. Musk, civet and ambergris were everywhere, all commonly thought to be pleasantly scented; the first two were also powerful aphrodisiacs. The wealthy made lavish use of such fragrances, splashing them over everything, even their fashionable little lapdogs. Henry VIII of England and his daughter Elizabeth I preferred a combination of rose and musk. Scent enabled the rich to make overt displays of their wealth by purchasing perfumed leather goods such as gloves, shoes, boots, belts and sword sheaths. Gold- and silversmiths invented scented jewels, bracelets, necklaces, rings and gemstones, which according to one contemporary theory were the result of water condensed by a particular smell.15

In the case of the plague, however, perfumes were used to keep people at a distance, not to entice them closer. The Toulouse-born doctor Oger Ferrier clearly demonstrated this in 1548, following mainstream advice by telling people to keep sniffing at a pomander, sprig of herbs or flowers, or a sponge dipped in vinegar and rose water when out walking. He also suggested they should take precautions against other people’s breath and the nauseating smell of the streets.16 All such observations repeatedly, almost obsessively, concur in describing people who had escaped the contagion, forced to venture out in public like terrified shadows, shunning all human contact. Not a square inch of their body, including beards and hair, was left without a protective layer of perfume. As Jean de Lampérière wrote in 1620,

Before leaving home, rub your temples, inside your nose, your lips, palms, the carpals where your arteries throb, even your heart with good Peru balm, which by its astringency closes the entrance to bad air, by its balsamic virtue resists corruption, and by its spirituous and odorous exhalation, cheers the heart and spirits; when going out, you must place in your mouth a piece of one of the following opiates: two drops of clove essence, or a few grains of ambergris, or angelica extract.17

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