The department is delighted to announce the publication of Scent and Sense in Medieval Material Culture, edited by Prof. Elina Gertsman. This collection of essays explores images and objects that take smells as their predicates, directing the inquiry on their tropological and often paradoxical meanings, and on their place in the medieval economy of remembrance and reflection. The volume, a guest-edited issue of Convivium, gathers essays drawing from several religious cultures of the global medieval world—Buddhist, Jewish, Christian (both western and eastern), Islamic—and offers a broad temporal span of several centuries. Among the featured authors are Sonya Rhie Mace, the George P. Bickford Curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art at the CMA, and Reed O’Mara, the department’s Mellon Fellow and doctoral student in medieval art.
