hortus conclusus

Hi all! I am working on the second installment of my medieval perfume story, trying to finish a draft of a dissertation chapter by Friday, teaching 3 hours a day, grading papers and finals for the super-intensive medical history class I have been TA-ing for the past three weeks, and frantically preparing for our upcoming anniversary voyage to Morocco and Spain (starting Saturday) so today’s post will be regrettably short. Luckily, you are all probably familiar with the lovely Eau d’Hadrien , so I needn’t go into great detail, only present my impressions of it. It really is lovely is Eau d’Hadrien ; its nose-tingling lemon zest—yes, a little like a lemon drop—reminds me of my trips to see concerts with my mother. She’d always buy me lemon drops at the orchestra hall,  although she was fundamentally opposed to ‘store-bought’ sweets. That was the only time I was allowed to ‘buy candy’, and so the flavor of those lemon drops always reminds me of our happy and frequent visits to the...

. Krh'ssai nu' pot? w?^d? e?mmele'ws po'dessin w?rxeu^nt? a?pa'lois a?mf? epo'enta Bw^mon po'as te'pen a?'nðos ma'lakon ma'teisai. Thus sometimes, the Cretan women, tender footed, dance in measure round the fair altar , crushing the fine bloom of the grass. Grassy scents for your consideration: Balmain Vent Vert Tommy Hilfiger T Girl CB I hate perfumes To See a Flower Nasomatto Hindu Grass Tauer Vetiver Dance Demeter Firefly Weil Bambou and antilope Gap Grass (I haven’t tried this) Annick Goutal Petite Cherie And a grass scent that ‘de-stresses’ here Marc Jacobs Grass Other ideas? CREDITS: Claude Lorraine painting and 3 dancing nymphs relief from Wikimedia Commons, Sappho poem and translation at Sacredtexts.com

I know this is old news for a lot of you, but I need to get my two cents in on everything, so I’m going to tell you what I, la Bonne Vivante, think of Annick Goutal’s Mandragore . First of all, this is an awesome name, conjuring images of village wise women pounding down mandrake roots in mortars and pestles, aphrodisiac concoctions containing dangerous ingredients like belladonna, hensbane, and mandrake,  and metempsychosis, the movement of a soul from one entity to another. And, of course, now the Harry Potter books, where Rowling uses the traditional folklore of the screaming root to great effect. My favorite literary reference to mandrake next to its use in the Old Testament to imply sexual intercourse (see the Song of Songs and Genesis 30 ) is the Great John Donne’s poem of impossibilities: Go and catch a falling star, Get with child a mandrake root, Tell me where all past years are, Or who cleft the Devil’s foot; Teach me to hear mermaids singing, Or to keep off ...