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Starbeck Education

Specialist supplier of inexpensive, exciting & unusual artefacts.

Plague Pomander

BH_577

 

£10.00

ex. VAT

 

Pomanders are mixtures of fragrant substances which are held within a container. The odours given off by the mixtures were once believed to offer protection against disease and they are particularly associated with times of plague, from the 1300’s onwards. Their use is linked to the theory of miasma, which suggested that disease was transmitted through foul-smelling air. Keeping a sweet smelling pomander close by was believed to offer protection.

You will receive one hessian pouch filled with a blend of wormwood, rose petals, lavender, cloves, myrrh, angelica and cinnamon, which have all been recorded as being used in contemporary accounts of the time, a blend such as this would have been stuffed into the beak of a plague doctor’s mask.

This is an historical curio, do not consume.

 

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