My research examines the role of smell and taste in Roman Catholic devotion in the Reformation era. This encompasses the practicality of smelling and tasting in devotional contexts and frameworks, the emotional resonance of those acts, and the theological and linguistic frameworks within which Catholics began to conceive of smell and taste in the early modern period.
Since the sensory turn in historical scholarship in the 1990s, scholars have explored case studies of smell and taste being used in Catholic devotion across Continental Europe in the early modern period. My own interest in this area developed whilst writing a published essay considering the role of smell, taste, and space in lay-people’s devotion to saints (University of St Andrews Theology and Arts Faculty Journal, February 2023). In this article I argued that smell, taste, and space - corporeal senses, which situate the body in relation to its physical environment - acted both to interiorise sanctity in worshippers and to keep the pursuit of sanctity boundaried by church authority.
My MPhil research will interrogate these conclusions, and the existing scholarship, in an unexplored context: Reformation England. My thesis will interrogate how Recusant Catholics in particular used smell and taste in reaction to the successive Protestant Reformations in England. England’s turbulent sixteenth century, marked by successive Reformations and one counter-Reformation, makes this study particularly interesting. So too does England’s geographical isolation from the Continent. If worshippers in Catholic areas of the continent were entrenched in ecclesiastical frameworks for sensory devotion, how did English Catholics under Protestant rule, cut off from the papal See, with limited priestly oversight, approach sensory devotion? How, when the priests were burned or banished, the altars stripped, the churches reappropriated, and the celebration of the Mass prohibited, did Catholic worshippers employ their senses to enact illicit forms of religious devotion?
My work will be strongly interdisciplinary, drawing on art history, theology, history, and the philosophy of language. I will work with material objects held in archives across the UK, and the literary (particularly poetic) output of Recusant Catholics under Protestant persecution.
I grew up in Nottinghamshire, England, and was home-educated by my parents before taking up my undergraduate studies in History at the University of St Andrews. During my undergraduate studies, I specialised in ecclesiastical history, examining both early modern sanctity and eighteenth century evangelicalism.
My academic research compliments my other main interest, which is poetry. My literary work draws on historical themes and literary motifs, as well as theology. Over the years I have been published in various literary journals, taken commissions, and have read at a host of conferences. Over the course of my research at Oxford, I expect my historical and theological studies to inform my creative writing.
