MEMS Lecture Series | Linda Rui Feng, University of Toronto

The uses of aromatics in late Medieval China operated in medicinal, religious, as well as secular contexts, with many types of aromatic materials having been imported from Southeast Asia. How did literary texts from this time capture this evolving and complex olfactory world? How were the experiences of smell, and curated scents in particular, described, classified and distinguished? This talk delves into the connoisseurial language associated with curated aromatics (香) in prose narratives from the ninth and tenth centuries, to examine how such language improvised and adapted vocabulary from related senses in order to capture these airborne and elusive sensory experiences.