The Trouble with Odours in Petrarch’s 'De Remediis'

A chapter of Petrarch’s Latin work De remediis utriusque fortunae [Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul] is devoted – to say it in the style of its Elizabethan translator, the doctor Thomas Twyne – to ‘pleasaunt smelles’. Considering the immense popularity that the book enjoyed in Europe for centuries, and the relative obscurity of the chapter on odour today, this essay revisits this short text with the aim of moving towards a fuller understanding of it and a better sense of its position within the framework to which it undoubtedly belongs – the cultural history of smell. In the context of the present collection of essays and of its fil rouge, the collaboration of the other senses with the visual, the fact that a dialogue on smell is there at all in De Remediis is of some interest. Its presence allows us to perceive that Petrarch attached a significant importance to that sense and believed it relevant to the overall discursive project of his book. This is not to deny that the surrounding sections of the volume also abound with reference to the visual. However, as the present reader will be able to sense, even these few pages testify to the value attached to olfactory experience, which was characterized by a rich cultural tradition and social significance. By examining the representation of odours in a woodcut illustration drawn from the later, printed edition of the De remediis, we also have the opportunity to test in one example how Renaissance visual culture engaged with the sense of smell. As nowadays the De remediis, completed in 1366, is far from being Petrarch’s best-known work, I begin by introducing in brief the textual framework of the chapter, subsequently describing and commenting on its subject matter, style and the form of its argument. I conclude by looking at a selection of near contemporary writings on smell to give a sense of the context of Petrarch’s attitudes.