Showing posts with label senses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label senses. Show all posts

Monday, October 13, 2025

Smells and bells? Just bells!

So, I’m working through my memoria documents – charitable endowments for commemorative services – for a paper I’m writing. These are two sets of Charters from Bregenz, one cluster from the early 15th century, and another from a century later, right at the start of the 16th century.

I’ll save the big observations for the paper itself, but thought it interesting that the documents are very clear, abundantly clear, about many things. The donor wants this service and that one, done in this order, with this personel. That’s the what and the who. They want their services done in this place and that one, by these personnel. That’s the where and the who. (“Who” matters twice because payment depends on it).

In these documents, we also know the why and the how. The why has been well-studied; memoria are services of remembrance for the donor and his ancestors and descendents. The prayers given at the service help all these people toward salvation, and so engage with a different “who” than the question of who performs. The people being prayed for are often named family, and include marital family as well as natal. Sometimes, they include aunts and uncles, cousins (particularly those in orders), and even second spouses. They include the dead and the living, a point which has always struck me as a bit odd. What does it mean to be praying in remembrance of someone who might themselves be standing at graveside?

And the how is clear. With crosses and processions. At graveside. With singing and speaking and reading. With standing and sitting and bowing heads, and all the other choreography of ritual. Or, as Ursula Speckerin (1405) puts it in her own Alemannic dialect,

with worship and beginning with proclamation, with singing and with reading, with standing and with prayers, and with all other things in the way previously prescribed. [mit libtind (?) und begiengingt mit verkundung mit singet und mit lesent mit stende und mit genbent und mit allen andren dingen in der wiscz als vorgesteben stat.]

To this, we add the gifts to the sacristan for the provisions for service. There’s bread, and more specifically bread for the poor. There’s wine for the service. There are lights – candles – not just for the vigil, but for both masses as well. And there are bells, bells for the vigil, bells to be rung at mass, bells to announce the service.

All these things are mentioned, for all these things have costs.

And so we can run through the multisensory modalities of these memoria services:

  • Sight: procession, cross, lights, people

  • Sound: singing, reading, reciting, saying, bells

  • Taste: bread, wine, “Tisch” or food at table (improved over their normal fare, in Ursula’s provisions)

  • Feel: bowing, standing, sitting: all the embodied shifts of orientation of an active quasi-choreographed worship

  • Smell: ???

The documents I’ve looked at, I realized, are completely tacet on the sense of smell. No mentions of incense or flowers or herbs or smoke or any other proxy for smell. The closest we get is the bread and the wine, placed on the altar and distributed to the poor, but the memoria endowments, for all their sometimes surprising specificity, don’t think to cover the sense of smell. And yet smell is typically a key part of liturgy. Its absence is striking.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of that. One plausible answer is because your incense for the censor is budgetted separately, and that in paying the sacristan you have already covered “the goods” necessary for the service. But it is an interesting omission, and speaks to the question of what goes without saying and what must be specified when you’re seeking control of events-of-remembrance for after your demise. Smell, it seems, was so woven into the fabric of ritual life that it didn’t need to be written down.

RESOURCES:

Bregenz, Stadtarchiv Urk. 19. (Ursula Speckerin, 1405). Consulted via monasterium.net. (A list of other relevant charters is available from the author.)

For more on movement during prayer, see:

Cyrus, Cynthia J. 2025. "Praying Before the Image of Mary: Nuns’ Prayerbooks and the Mapping of Sacred Space" Religions 16, no. 10: 1277. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16101277

Two standard works on memoria are:

Geuenich, Dieter, and Otto Gerhard Oexle. 1994. Memoria in der Gesellschaft des Mittelalters. Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte, Bd. 111. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Geary, Patrick J. 1994. Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the end of the first Millennium. Princeton: Princeton UP.

 

Smells and bells? Just bells!

So, I’m working through my memoria documents – charitable endowments for commemorative services – for a paper I’m writing. These are two s...