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Scenting Salvation - Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Paperback)
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Scenting Salvation - Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Paperback)
Series: Transformation of the Classical Heritage, 42
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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This book explores the role of bodily, sensory experience in early
Christianity (first seventh centuries AD) by focusing on the
importance of smell in ancient Mediterranean culture. Following its
legalization in the fourth century Roman Empire, Christianity
cultivated a dramatically flourishing devotional piety, in which
the bodily senses were utilized as crucial instruments of
human-divine interaction. Rich olfactory practices developed as
part of this shift, with lavish uses of incense, holy oils, and
other sacred scents. At the same time, Christians showed profound
interest in what smells could mean. How could the experience of
smell be construed in revelatory terms? What specifically could it
convey? How and what could be known through smell? Scenting
Salvation argues that ancient Christians used olfactory experience
for purposes of a distinctive religious epistemology: formulating
knowledge of the divine in order to yield, in turn, a particular
human identity. Using a wide array of Pagan, Jewish, and Christian
sources, Susan Ashbrook Harvey examines the ancient understanding
of smell through religious rituals, liturgical practices,
mystagogical commentaries, literary imagery, homiletic conventions;
scientific, medical, and cosmological models; ascetic disciplines,
theological discourse, and eschatological expectations. In the
process, she argues for a richer appreciation of ancient notions of
embodiment, and of the roles the body might serve in religion.
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