by Tiéphaine Thomason (@teaphaine)
This is the first post in a three-part series for the Doing History Advent Calendar on the history of the senses and the gifts of the Magi.
When first drafting this post, I had written something short about the role of frankincense and its scent in early modern churches. Just as I was about to put out the draft, I stumbled across this extraordinarily comprehensive post by William Tullett, the historian of early modern sensory history and scent, as part of a broader project on historical scent (“Odeuropa”).[1] I direct any curious person towards it. For a hastily redrafted and much less rigorous overview, see below.
Frankincense is one of three gifts offered by the Magi in Christian tradition at Christ’s nativity. Unlike many apocryphal details that have wormed their way into the Christmas canon, frankincense, along with myrrh and gold, is actually referenced in the gospel of Matthew.[2] The Biblical Magi, Three Kings, or (as they are sometimes demoted) the Wise Men are typically commemorated on the feast of the Epiphany in January. (The exact date in January and the type of cake consumed in celebration differ depending on the Christian tradition you encounter.) Stories on the Magi are muddled and their names (Melchior, Gaspard, and Balthazar) are likely medieval inventions. Gaspard, traditionally portrayed as a King of India, typically gifts frankincense to the infant Christ – and his gift would have been one of the more familiar scents across much of early modern Europe and the Middle East, not to mention many parts of Asia. It would also have been quite familiar to Western Christian crowds in the early modern period.
If you assume that Gaspard’s association with the scent is because frankincense comes from India, then you might be forgiven. There are a number of varieties of frankincense, concentrated in India, yes, but also in the East of Africa moving into the Middle East. You will find it across the Arabian peninsula, such as in Oman and Yemen, then across the red sea, into East African countries such as Ethiopia. As I found when first drafting this post (and Tullett comfortingly notes in his work), ‘frankincense’ is especially hard to track down in archives as the term is interchangeably used with ‘incense’ in sources. A version of this post began, in fact, with an anecdote drawn from French archives of a fight breaking out in a cathedral in the West of France in 1768, where ‘frankincense’ or simply ‘incense’ (both are ‘encens’) makes a small appearance.[3]
Churches, in particular Catholic churches, remained one of the key spaces in which early modern Europeans would have encountered frankincense. (There is a significant body of literature for those curious on the scents and senses of early modern European piety.)[4] Protestant churches sought to remove this heavy and sweetly woody scent – and this seems to have applied in a relatively chequered manner to Anglican churches too. When the British (Anglicans) took over the island of Martinique in the Caribbean in 1762, which had previously been occupied by the French (Catholics), and began practising Anglican services in churches of the town of Saint-Pierre, the French expressed their dismay at Anglican forms of worship.[5] In particular, some priests claimed in horror that much of Saint-Pierre’s enslaved population could not tell the difference between Anglican and Catholic mass, choosing to attend the former with few reservations.[6] Hidden within these vitriolic comments was the implication that there were some rather obvious differences between these services – most notably, the smell.
[1] For Tullett’s work see, for instance, William Tullett, Smell in Eighteenth-Century England : A Social Sense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
[2] Matthew 2:11; for a fabulously apocryphal story, see the Child Ballad and Christmas Carol ‘The Cherry-Tree Carol’, in which the pregnant Virgin Mary asks Joseph to pick cherries for her. This is Sting’s rendition and this is the version by the King’s College Choir in Cambridge.
[3] Archives municipales de Nantes, FF 278, non-foliated.
[4] One of my favourites, which mostly considers touch, is Irene Galandra-Cooper and Mary Laven’s ‘The Material Culture of Piety in the Italian Renaissance: Retouching the Rosary’, in The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Catherine Richardson et al. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017): 338-53.
[5] Most of the account on the chaos around the sharing of churches is in the Archives nationales d’outre-mer, COL F3 28.
[6] Reading against these priestly accounts, it might simply be suggested that those enslaved men and women who did go to Anglican services knew full well what they were doing, and may not have cared for Catholic masses as much as the French priests did.
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