Abstract

In this paper, I defend the claim that for Aristotle the phrase “art imitates nature” does not express a novel belief about teleology as often assumed, but a belief common to Aristotle and his predecessors about how artistic methods of production were first discovered and how arts progress. I trace the history of this belief from some early Greek medical writers, as preserved in the Hippocratic Corpus, through Democritus and Plato to Aristotle. I also show that by looking at how early Greek medical and philosophical writers understood discovery and progress in the arts, we can better understand Aristotle’s expectations for a scientific investigation into nature and what motivated the method of inquiry he thinks the natural scientist should adopt. An advantage of this approach is that it accounts for resemblances among Aristotle’s claim and similar ones in other writers from Democritus to Dante.*

Abstract

In this talk, I make the case that Greco-Egyptian perfumery and alchemy are more closely related than usually assumed. I do this by exploring sources related to what I call the “Venerean arts”: Greek discussions of arts associated with Aphrodite or Venus that involve transforming something plain into something more luxurious, e.g., fabric dyeing, the production of artificial stones and the production of metals (the ancestors of alchemy). The practical, lexical, and conceptual similarities across these different arts is noted regularly in ancient technical sources; modern scholars, however, have missed them. I proceed in two parts. The first is negative: it shows that some technical terminology of Greco-Egyptian perfumery has been misunderstood due to the influence of later medieval translations. The second part is positive: it provides evidence that this technical terminology refers to analogous processes in perfumery, dyeing and alchemy in ancient Greek and Latin sources before the fifth century CE. Whether these similarities are due to the use of common ingredients and methods, or whether they imply a common way of understanding artistic production and material change is a question I explore at the end.

Lecture by Sean Coughlin as part of the Odeuropa Smellinar organized by Will Tullett.

For more information, visit: https://odeuropa.eu/smellinars/

The Fragrance of Authority: Did Medieval Folks Smell Power? And Did Power Want to be Smelled?

Joëlle Rollo-Koster, Professor of Medieval History, University of Rhode Island

Part of the Workshop: Scents of Religious Authority, 5 & 6 June 2023.

Growing from research undertaken for my latest book, The Great Western Schism, 1378-1417: Performing Legitimacy, Performing Unity (CUP, 2022) my new project emphasizes the sense of smell as a vehicle to inculcate political authority. While seeing, hearing, tasting, and touching are overly emphasized by the historiography, smell has not been fully considered. Looking at the ceremonials surrounding the granting of the Golden Rose, a precious object that the pope offered to the most ardent defensor of Christianity of his time, I will discuss how the rose taught its audience (via its aroma) how to recognize legitimate authority, and maybe how authorities “controlled” this smell to assert themselves.

Register here via our EventBrite page.

The Use of Aromata in Late Egyptian Cult and Their Symbolic Significance

Recipe texts reported by classic authors record general aspects of the use of aromata from the Greco-Roman period in Egypt, especially in the form of "perfume" as a commercial product of that time. As a part of the project Alchemies of Scent, this study aims to let the Egyptian sources speak for themselves in order to explore the cultural-historical significance of the use of aromata in ancient Egypt.

The offering of Aromata as incense and anointing is reflected in numerous ritual acts that have been recorded in texts and representations carved in the Late Egyptian temple decoration. Cultural and historical aspects are discussed and analyzed: the description of the sensual perception of the fragrance, the naming of aromata and other substances, the presentation of the aromata, their effect and their use in rituals.

Stypsis: Some Shared Technical Vocabulary of Perfumery, Dyeing and Alchemy

Stypsis (στῦψις) and related terms (στύμμα, στύφω and compounds) occur in Greek and Latin texts about perfumery by, e.g., Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Pliny the Elder and Galen. Sometimes they are used in a non-technical way to denote the property of astringency, i.e., the puckering, dry-mouth feeling associated with red wine, tannin-rich teas, and alum (a common double sulphate salt of aluminum and another cation). They are also used in technical contexts to describe ingredients and processes related to a part of the perfume making process. This process is called stypsis, and its purpose is to prepare an oil for receiving the desired scent by introducing ingredients into it called stymmata. For several centuries, translators have rendered the term stypsis with a word in the target language that denotes a process of thickening. In this paper, I show that such translations are misleading, and propose a novel reading.

The Common Technical Vocabulary of Perfumery, Dyeing, and Alchemy

Sean Coughlin

My narrow aim is to suggest that familiar translations of perfumery-related terms are often misleading and cause us to miss connections between perfumery and arts I am calling Venerean, by which I mean the arts of producing (not digging up) luxury goods, especially dyeing clothes, production of artificial precious stones and metals.

I focus on the case of stypsis. Stypsis is usually translated into English as ‘thicken’ in perfumery contexts, as ‘mordant’ in dyeing contexts, and as ‘make astringent’ in all others. None of our sources however suggest the process it names has anything to do with thickening. The story of how the name for the process came to be associated with thickening is itself an obscure and interesting story. My aim is to show, however, that what stypsis means in the context of perfumery can be understood in the same way as in contexts of dyeing and the manufacture of artificial precious stones and metals. We will use a little kitchen chemistry to explore what those processes are like.

My larger aim is to offer a test case of what we can learn about ancient arts by looking at technical vocabulary used in common across them. This vocabulary is worth looking at because it encodes for both technical processes and theoretical presuppositions. In other words, the vocabulary is reliable (but not exhaustive) evidence for how they thought their methods worked. This can in turn contribute to mapping the phylogeny of natural and applied sciences, and ultimately I am curious what that phylogeny can teach us about the variation and transmission of both techniques and assumptions about how natural materials can be used.

Part of Ancient history research seminar, University of Cambridge, Faculty of Classics

Organized by Dr. Lea Niccolai.

Archaeological approaches to the consumption of perfumes, cosmetics, and medicaments in Rome’s north-western provinces

On Monday, 24 October 2022, Thomas Derrick will present his work on ancient Roman perfumery with a talk entitled: Archaeological approaches to the consumption of perfumes, cosmetics, and medicaments in Rome’s north-western provinces. 

The talk will be framed around his doctoral work on unguentaria from Roman Britain but will also focus on the heuristic value of studying contextualised small glass containers. Derrick explores the potential for material culture centred approaches to socio-corporeal behaviours throughout the Roman Empire.

The event will be held in person at the Alchemies of Scent lab in Prague. Guests from abroad can attend online. Details below.

Event Details

Talk Title: “Archaeological approaches to the consumption of perfumes, cosmetics, and medicaments in Rome's north-western provinces”

Speaker: Dr Thomas J Derrick (University of Leicester)

Host: Alchemies of Scent, Department of Ancient and Mediaeval Thought, Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences

Date: Monday October 24, 2022

Time: 14:00 - 16:00 CEST

Attending

In Person

Place: Alchemies of Scent, Husova 7, 110 00, Praha 1

Register: alchemiesofscent@gmail.com

Online

Zoom: Register Here

“Experimental Approaches to the Study of Past Scents”

Sean Coughlin

Part of the workshop Senses in Ancient Philosophy and Science

Organized by

Chiara Cecconi
Glyn Muitjens
Carolina Welslau

Cohesive Causes in Ancient Greek Philosophy and Medicine

Sean Coughlin

Abstract: This paper is about the history of a question in ancient Greek philosophy and medicine: what holds the parts of a whole together? The idea that there is a single cause responsible for cohesion is usually associated with the Stoics. They refer to it as the synectic cause (αἴτιον συνεκτικόν), a term variously translated as ‘cohesive cause,’ ‘containing cause’ or ‘sustaining cause.’ The Stoics, however, are neither the first nor the only thinkers to raise this question or to propose a single answer. Many earlier thinkers offer their own candidates for what actively binds parts together, with differing implications not only for why we are wholes rather than heaps, but also why our bodies inevitably become diseased and fall apart. This paper assembles, up to the time of the Stoics, one part of the history of such a cause: what is called ‘the synechon’ (τὸ συνέχον) – that which holds things together. Starting with our earliest evidence from Anaximenes (sixth century BCE), the paper looks at different candidates and especially the models and metaphors for thinking about causes of cohesion which were proposed by different philosophers and doctors including Empedocles, early Greek doctors, Diogenes of Apollonia, Plato and Aristotle. My goal is to explore why these candidates and models were proposed and how later philosophical objections to them led to changes in how causes of cohesion were understood.

Place: Utrecht University

Date: Thursday 6 October 2022

Time: 15:00 CEST

Part of History of Philosophy Colloquium

Website: https://www.uu.nl/en/research/philosophy/history-of-philosophy

The fragrance of places we have not known

Sean Coughlin

Abstract: In this session, we will explore the ‘Oriental’ family of commercial fragrances of the 20th and 21st centuries. We will smell and see our way back to some of its ancestors in ancient Mediterranean representations of ‘the east’; and we will look at how the reception of these representations have fed back into and biased our understanding of the flora and fragrances of the past. Until recently, ‘Oriental’ has been used in commercial perfumery to classify a family of fragrances that includes (among others) cinnamon and cassia, cardamom and clove, frankincense and myrrh. For many in the industry, it has become increasingly obvious that this family differs from other commercially recognized ones: families, like ‘floral,’ ‘fresh’ and ‘woody.’ These families classify according to sensory experience (summer gardens, freshly cut grass, mossy branches); ‘oriental’ recalls no such experience. Instead, ‘oriental’ is the fragrance of a fantasy marketplace of exotic spices. The implicit Eurocentrism of the term has led perfumers and olfactory taxonomists to replace it with ‘amber;’ yet, despite the change in name, the family remains largely the same and so continues to offer a whiff of what ‘oriental’ means when applied to fragrance, how it relates to past representations of eastern lands, and how our own experience of this idealized marketplace has been read back into Greek and Latin (and even Egyptian) literature.

Place: Cardiff University / Online via zoom

Date: Friday 9 September 2022

Time: 14:30 CEST / 13:30 BST

Part of I’m Your Venus: The Reception of Antiquity in Modern Cosmetic Advertising and Marketing

Organized by Laurence Totelin (Cardiff) and Jane Draycott (Glasgow)

7–9 September 2022

Cardiff University and online via Zoom

Register: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/im-your-venus-the-reception-of-antiquity-in-modern-cosmetic-advertising-tickets-401670365877