ABSTRACT
Smell is an especially intimate sense. This chapter describes the spiritual-sensory sociality in a Carmelite context thus offers additional dimensions to claims about the nature of olfactory cognition. Secular philosophers necessarily have conceptualised smell from a human point of view. Teresian theologians conversely imagine the world through the divine senses: we should, wrote Teresa, show gratitude to God for enduring our foul odour'. The nuns' papers make evident the importance of Smell to their aesthetic and to their experience of the convent as a lived environment. Early modern Carmelite identity revealed in this chapter is not determined by either sensory or literary originality. Sensory history like the history of the afterlife is thus a social history, dealing with relationships between one group and the other'. The chapter presents nuns' experience of smell links their constantly-convergent sensory-spiritual worlds. It also provides a structure to the discussion of earthly and of celestial smells.
