3 - Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Nostre Dame and the Powers of Olfaction

Summary

Smell is the mute sense, the one without words. Lacking a vocabulary, we are left tongue-tied, groping for words in a sea of inarticulate pleasure and exaltation.

Smell is hard to represent in text or image. Describing the difference between two pleasant or unpleasant fragrances – in English at least – pushes us into comparative structures that can only point outside representational limits to the world of real experience (it smells of, it smells like …). What tends to be registered primarily in our descriptions is a value judgment or an affective response, normally pleasure or disgust. Aroma acts on us, activating memories and emotions, past and present. Spaces may be coterminous with scents, which makes olfactory perception a way of navigating and understanding our environment. Because smell can be so visceral, it is a site onto which ethical and social values are projected. Bigoted distinctions in class and race may be expressed along olfactory lines. Discernment for truth may be conceived as an act of sniffing (Nietzsche located his genius in his nostrils), and suspicious activity may give off a ‘fishy’ smell. Olfactory scientist Avery Gilbert states that while smell is in the animal world predominantly a call to action, ‘human cognitive abilities turn smells into symbols’. As an object of cultural inquiry, smell sits therefore at a suggestive intersection of actual sense-experience, affect, and symbolization. All the while, the serious challenge of disentangling these three aspects from one another makes smell of potential methodological and theoretical importance for new lines of research in sensory history, affect theory, and aesthetics as a branch of philosophy.

This essay takes as its focus the poetic output of Gautier de Coinci, a monastic author writing in Old French between 1214 and 1233 at the Abbey of Vic-sur-Aisne in northeastern France. Gautier composed what is now called the Miracles de Nostre Dame (Miracles of Our Lady), a compilation made of two ‘books’ (livres) that follow a carefully designed structure. Each book opens and ends with a series of lyric songs and chants, while the main bulk of the text is taken up by miracle narratives of various lengths written in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, a standard French narrative form of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.