ABSTRACT
As sensory historian Mark S.R. Jenner has argued, it is better to fully follow the whiff of a particular savor than to create a grand narrative that privileges sight as modern and evolved, relegating the lower senses of taste, touch, and smell to some uncivilized place in the past.1 Jenner’s study briefly follows the sensate history and reception of garlic in England. Beginning with “the English aversion to the smell of garlic [as] stereotypically one aspect of the Victorian repression of sensuality,” Jenner notes that “there is considerable evidence of English aversion to the pungent herb in previous centuries.”2 While dislike of the smell of garlic is often simply xenophobic – garlic is usually represented as a French or Italian food – or even more prominently “a marker of social (and not just national) distinction throughout the early modern period,” Jenner observes that garlic is also associated with religious austerity. Garlic was listed in herbals as having some medicinal qualities; and most importantly, despite all of the representations of the poor, foreign, reeking garlic-stench, “garlic was being cultivated and used.”3 By creating such a nuanced osmology and history of garlic odors in England, Jenner suggests how we must encounter the scents and sensibilities of the past. Unlike Jenner’s garlic, however, the leek that features so prominently in Shakespeare’s Henry V is not just a pungent vegetable. It is, rather, a cultural emblem of Wales, which further complicates both olfactory and literary representations.
