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"Susan Ashbrook Harvey has surely produced the definitive analysis of the role of scent in Early Christian ritual and theological discourse. This is a welcome new trajectory in the study of religion and the body."—Patricia Cox Miller, author of The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography
List of contents
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. The Olfactory Context: Smelling the Early Christian World
A Martyr’s Scent
Sacrifice: The Aroma of Relation
Daily Smells: Powers and Promises
God’s Perfume: Imagined Glory and the Scent of Life
2. The Christian Body: Ritually Fashioned Experience
A New Place
A Revelatory World
Participatory Knowing: Ritual Scents and Devotional Uses
Participatory Knowing: Scents and Sense
Excursus: Incense Offerings in the Syriac Transitus Mariae
3. Olfaction and Christian Knowing
Sense Perception in the Ancient Mind
Christian Senses in a Christian World
Olfactory Analogies as Theological Tools
Revelatory Scents: Olfaction and Identity
Remembering Knowledge: Liturgical Commentaries
Excursus: On the Sinful Woman in Syriac Tradition
4. Redeeming Scents: Ascetic Models
The Smell of Danger: Marking Sensory Contexts
The Fragrance of Virtue: Reordering Olfactory Experience
The Spiritual Senses: Relocating Perception
Ascetic Practice and Embodied Liturgy
The Stylite’s Model
A Syriac Tradition Continued
5. Sanctity and Stench
Ascetic Stench: Sensation and Dissonance
Stench and Morality: Mortality and Sin
Ascetic Senses
Asceticism: Holy Stench, Holy Weapon
6. Resurrection, Sensation, and Knowledge
Bodily Expectation
Salvific Knowing
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Susan Ashbrook Harvey is Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Asceticism and Society in Crisis: John of Ephesus and The Lives of the Eastern Saints and coauthor of Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, both from UC Press.
Summary
Using a wide array of Pagan, Jewish, and Christian sources, this book examines the ancient understanding of smell through religious rituals, liturgical practices, mystagogical commentaries, literary imagery, theological discourse, and eschatological expectations.
