Andrew Kettler’s research while affiliated with University of South Carolina and other places

In seventeenth-century North America, efforts at cultural accommodation through similarities in olfactory inclusive spiritual sensoriums helped to create cross-cultural concordance between Jesuit Fathers and Native Americans in New France, the St. Lawrence Valley, and the Pays d'en Haut. Jesuits engaged Native Americans towards Catholic conversion by using scentful tactics and sensory rhetoric. Jesuits increased their own respect for the olfactory during their North American encounters due to a siege mentality born of the Counter-Reformation and from a forcefully influential Native American respect for multisensory forms of environmental and spiritual literacy which included a heightened reverence for odors.

In late-nineteenth-century London, George Wilhelm Septimus Piesse drove perfume markets to find new wealth through a previously repressed English sense of smell. Piesse created a romantic fictional character, Mercutio Frangipani, to reinvigorate scenting into the English sensorium. Piesse fashioned his mythical hero Frangipani, a botanist who discovered the shoreline through his sense of smell on one of Columbus' voyages to the New World, to tie his product to exotic encounters of the Atlantic World. The perfumer's construct became a historical figure despite a lack of documentary evidence. Piesse's invention of Mercutio as a New World discoverer left that figure available to later discourses, altering the history surrounding Columbus' encounter with the Caribbean, the discoveries of the Jesuit botanist Charles Plumier, and the Frangipani household's true fragrant bequest as the creators of synthetic perfume in the seventeenth century. In order to tie his synthetic product, the Frangipanni perfume, to the luxury of early modern French courts and the mysterious nature of the pre-European Americas, Piesse offered an agnotological misstep; the story of a counterfeit man, his exceptional nose, and a tantalizing scentful detection of the West Indian shoreline.