Dispersing the Devil’s Stench: Shifting Perceptions of Sulfuric Miasma in Early Modern English Literatures

Abstract

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 dis-enchantment 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 18th 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.