Osmé: A Cultural History of Fragrance is an online journal focused on the historical, social, and cultural movements that shape scent culture and influence the fragrance industry.
In Early Modern Europe, witchcraft was as much a sensory threat as a moral or theological one. In the Witch Trials, the witch was imagined as possessing penetrating supernatural senses that could harm people by simply sensing them. To accuse a woman of witchcraft was to accuse her of perceiving, feeling, and knowing the world in a fiendish way. She embodied the diabolically corrupted form of the female senses. The brilliant Constance Classen referred to this as the Diabolical
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