Los olores: retórica y representación desde el ámbito conventual femenino novohispano

Abstract

This research focuses on how nuns’ convents established in the Viceroyalty in New Spain and the nuns who lived there formed part of a tradition of rhetoric and visual representation in which smells played a symptomatic role by transcending the realm of sensory perception to become emblems of virtue and indicators of vice and corruption. It emphasizes the revision of images and texts containing information about the different types of smells that apparently were characteristic of convents, as well as the diverse ways in which they were interpreted.