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A Discerning Smell: Olfaction among the Senses in St. Bonaventure's Long Life of St. Francis

The fifth chapter of Saint Bonaventure’s Long Life of Saint Francis, the Legenda maior (1260-1263), is a veritable blazon of the body of Francis and its senses, physical and spiritual.1 The first chapter in the so-called “Inner Life” – the sequence of eight chapters on the virtues (and, I have argued, the beatitudes) of St. Francis – Chapter Five is notable for its insistent focus on sensory experience, due both to Francis’s physical mortifications and to his consciousness of the world’s beauty, the “comfort” provided to him by the “creatures” he touched, tasted, heard, and saw.2 The chapter opens with a declaration of Francis’s choice to “carry in his own body the armor of the cross” by holding “in check his sensual appetites,” practicing self-denial lest he give in “to the earthbound inclinations of the senses,”3 and they impede his