Tracing the Medieval Italian Literary Smellscape

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This project investigates how Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio repeatedly employ the sense of smell in their literary works. Descriptions of smell in these works, which range from the stench of Hell to the intoxicating scent of a lover, point to larger questions surrounding cultural significance of smell in the Middle Ages. Smell's indicative and sometimes-contradictory qualities in medical, religious, and intimate settings during this time suggest a new layer of complexity inherent in descriptions of smells and smelling in the works of these authors. The literary depth, broad reception, and vernacular language of these particular authors offer a privileged and wide view into understandings of smell during the medieval Italian period.The key questions guiding this project include: how did Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio (the tre corone) treat smell in their literary works, and how can we use their representations of the scent and the experience of smelling to chart the smellscape of medieval Italian literature? Once established, how does the smellscape offer new perspectives on the key themes of desire, punishment, gender, the body, and the relationship between humans and the Earth in medieval Italian literature?In the introduction, I will establish the olfactory lexicon: what words did the authors use to describe smelling and smells? How do the linguistic, rhetorical, or etymological features of these words function in the context of sensory experience? In the first chapter, I seek to answer questions surrounding the historical smellscape: which smells dominated spaces? How were smells medically, aesthetically, and spiritually harnessed in medieval Italian culture? How could have the meanings ascribed to smell in these spaces influenced their employment in literary texts? The second chapter considers olfaction within the landscape of sensory experience, with a focus on desire and gendered smells. Smell could embody gendered desire in some situations while in others it could also illustrate gendered disgust. In this light, how does smell communicate desire and disgust for the female 'other,' and how do scents-constructed, like perfume, or natural-convey gendered hierarchies of power in these texts?While the second chapter centers the human relation to smell, the questions leading the third chapter situate smell as a mediator in human and non-human interactions. Smells that enter the human body act as a tactile intermediary between humans and their non-human environments. How does smell blur the lines between the human and non-human in its liaison role? Does the process of blurring reflect other barriers between the human and the non-human in these works?To answer these questions, my methods draw from those of Hans Rindisbacher (1992) in particular, who has broadly sketched the use of smell in literature through historicization, sociocultural analysis, and close textual readings. My methodology is similar in that I begin with textual examples of scent and smelling and then work outwards, pulling scholarship from multiple disciplines in order to understand the complexity and depth embedded in the sense's employment. The coalescence of the small amount of current scholarship on medieval Italian literary smell and the burgeoning study of smell in adjacent disciplines underlines the rich potential for a major study of smell in the medieval Italian literary field. While the project most directly falls into medieval Italian literary studies, the project incorporates scholarship from the fields of philosophy, psychology, anthropology, religion, and history in order to address the complexity of the sense of smell in the temporospatial landscape of the three authors. The project will contribute to the field by offering the first monograph work on the sense of smell, building upon the recent wave of sensory scholarship in the medieval Italian literary studies and propounding an interdisciplinary approach to sensory studies