“Ravishing Odors of Paradise”: Jesuits, Olfaction, and Seventeenth-Century North America

Abstract

In seventeenth-century North America, efforts at cultural accommodation through similarities in olfactory inclusive spiritual sensoriums helped to create cross-cultural concordance between Jesuit Fathers and Native Americans in New France, the St. Lawrence Valley, and the Pays d'en Haut. Jesuits engaged Native Americans towards Catholic conversion by using scentful tactics and sensory rhetoric. Jesuits increased their own respect for the olfactory during their North American encounters due to a siege mentality born of the Counter-Reformation and from a forcefully influential Native American respect for multisensory forms of environmental and spiritual literacy which included a heightened reverence for odors.