ABSTRACT
Current thinking about the sense of smell, originating in Aristotle and reinforced by the nineteenth-century scientific devaluation identified by Corbin, designates odors as difficult to understand and even bestial. However, medieval European scholars developed a comprehensive theory that allowed odors to provide certainty about the qualities of beings and objects in the physical and spiritual realms. Like any sense object, odors were certainly not infallible, but they were useful, once the nature, abilities, and limitations of odors were understood. Odors allowed physicians to identify people, places, and things as healthy or unhealthy. Since odor was useful in identifying sources of diseases such as the plague, doctors communicated olfactory theory to the general public in the interests of public health. Urban areas enforced laws based on olfactory theory to prevent illness, which increased awareness of smell theory among ordinary people. Finally, fusion of scholastic smell theory with traditional olfactory theology reinforced popular knowledge of it. This book should be a beginning to further olfactory research in areas such as the end of scholastic smell theory; the olfactory senses of animals; and the social use of odor and olfactory theory to judge people considered outsiders, such as Jews, heretics, and lepers.
