Barthold Heinrich Brockes’ Physico-Theology of Smell

Frank Krause

Abstract


Studies on the significance of olfaction for philosophical aesthetics are justifiably interested in innovative literary explorations of links between aesthetic values and olfactory perceptions. In this context, the early Enlightenment poetry by Barthold Heinrich Brockes has remained neglected: literary historians rarely pay attention to his approaches to smell, and the few pertinent studies appeared in German only. This article introduces the English-speaking public to the valuation of smell in the theological aesthetics of Brockes’ poems, and it concludes with a sketch of his contribution to the tradition of modern cultic smelling, in which the olfactory and the aesthetic are variously intertwined. He thematises smelling as an emotional climax of human relations to external nature which are validated by a sacred essence of the experiential world, the awareness of which can be conjured up through innerworldly poetic thought. This interpretive pattern of olfactory culture has remained relevant to the present day.

Keywords


German Literature; Enlightenment; Nature Poetry; Natural Theology; Literature as Ritual; Literature and Olfaction

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12734411

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ESPES. The Slovak Journal of Aesthetics (ISSN 1339-1119) is published biannually by University of Presov, Slovakia and the Society for Aesthetics in Slovakia. Registration number of the journal in the Register of Periodical Publications of the Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic: EV173/23/EPP.

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