Date Published:

Abstract:

From approximately 1500 to 1650, English references to sulfur’s stench focused on sensory indications of hell, demons, and wickedness in worldly environments. Thereafter, most English references to the pungent rock turned proportionately to technics, medicine, and progress. The increasing presence of sulfuric miasma within secularizing applications for fumigations, gunpowder, and industry led to a limiting of the role of sulfur as a signifier of hell within English environments. Due to economic incentives, supernatural discourses on brimstone atmospheres faced semantic dispersion, as sulfur took on a growing number of connotations instead of remaining a significant environmental signifier of the scent of the devil and his toadies. These shifting literary associations for sulfur exemplify the fluctuating powers of the market, religious voices, biopolitical networks, and the state to define what is matter out of place, or what can be considered too environmentally toxic for economic consumption. Revising the prominence of synchronic work in Early Modern Studies that critiques the disenchantment thesis, and redeploying theory from Douglas, Jameson, Greenblatt, Eagleton, and Rancière, this essay highlights connections between the History of Ideas, Environmental Studies, and literary criticism through asserting that the sheer abundance of sulfuric substances in the environment, caused by increased uses for the rock in the coal-fired furnaces of the eighteenth century, added to a literary dislodgment of mystical definitions of sulfur’s smell as signifying evil. As the Industrial Revolution stuffed chimneys with additional sulfur compounds, material encounters with brimstone became common. Continuously taught that sulfur meant profit and purity, reformed English noses found less sin in the smell of acrid sulfur smoke. This analysis portrays that within literatures that included associations to sulfur, the impending Anthropocene was tested, greenwashed, and approved by the masses of the disenchanting English public sphere.

August 2023: Andrew Kettler taught at the University of Toronto from 2017 to 2019 before serving as an Ahmanson-Getty Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles during the 2019-2020 academic year. He is currently serving as Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Carolina-Palmetto College. His work has appeared in Senses and Society, Interface, Human Rights Review, the Journal of American Studies, the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, Patterns of Prejudice, and the Australian Feminist Law Journal. His monograph, The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2020), focuses on the development of racist semantics concerning miasma and the contrasting expansion of aromatic consciousness in the making of subaltern resistance to racialized olfactory discourses of state, religious and slave masters.

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