In Our Time - The Unicorn

Episode Date: October 28, 2010

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the unicorn. In the 5th century BC a Greek historian, Ctesias, described a strange one-horned beast which he believed to live in a remote area of India. Later classical scholars, including Aristotle and Pliny, added to his account of this animal which they called the monoceros, a vicious ass-like creature with a single horn in the middle of its forehead.For centuries the monoceros or unicorn was widely accepted to be a real - if rarely seen - beast. It appears in the Bible, and in the Middle Ages became a powerful Christian symbol. It continued to be represented in art and literature throughout the Renaissance, when 'unicorn horn' became one of the most valuable commodities on earth, thanks to its supposed properties as an antidote to poison. As late as the seventeenth century, scientists believed they had found conclusive proof of the existence of unicorns. It was some time before the animal was shown to be a myth; four hundred years on, the unicorn retains much of its fascination and symbolic power.With:Juliette WoodAssociate Lecturer in Folklore at Cardiff UniversityLauren KassellLecturer in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of CambridgeDavid EkserdjianProfessor of the History of Art and Film at the University of Leicester.Producer: Thomas Morris.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. In 1486, a German priest published the first ever printed and illustrated travel book entitled A Journey to the Holy Land. It was an account of a pilgrimage you'd made to Jerusalem three years earlier. It contains one detail which might surprise readers today, a description complete with picture of a unicorn, which the author had spotted, he said, on a hill near Mount Sinai. To the 15th century mind, this sighting was entirely plausible. Writers had documented the habits of the unicorn, a horse-like creature with a horn in the middle of its forehead, for centuries. It was believed

to be a savage beast which could only be tamed by a chased young woman. The unicorn featured in art, in medicine, and in religious iconography, and its horn was one of the most valuable commodities of the Renaissance, much coveted by European royalty. Today, those sciences debunked it, the unicorn retains much of its potency as a symbol. With me to discuss the unicorn are Juliet Woods, Associate Lecturer in Folklore at Cardiff University, Lauren Castle, senior lecturer in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge, and David Exurgent, Professor of the History of Art and Film at the University of Lester.

Julia Wood, we think of the unicorn today as a white horse with a single twisted horn, but has it always been imagined like that? No, the first description, Cetis, who was a... A Greek physician at the Persian court writing about India, which is the most exotic place he could write about, says that the unicorn is an ass-sized, bigger than an ass. And the horn he describes is actually shorter and darker than the horn we have. He does, however, say that the horn will prevent poison, prevent you being poisoned, prevent you being having an epileptic fit. And he says that it's a very fierce animal and will defend its young to the death. cannot take it alive. So it's both like and unlike our modern unicorn.

What period of time are you? It's the 4th century BC. So it's an early reference. How plausible generally are natural observations thought to be at that period? Not very. But they did their best. I mean, he wasn't describing something he thought was fantastical and he wasn't trying to describe this. He wouldn't have seen it. But he would have accepted that in a place like India, there would be freaks and marvel. I mean, that was the perception of Europe, particularly the Greeks, of the kind of outer world as India would have been. So when this was written down by this man as having been spotted,

did that just enter into accepted knowledge? It did. Nobody accepted it wholeheartedly. I mean, there was always this sense, and in a sense kind of proto-scientific way of looking at things, that everyone who described it sort of re-described it, they didn't just repeat what he said, but they would have no reason to doubt that he was describing a real animal.

Because going to the remote parts of India and Tibet in those days would be rather like going to space, wouldn't it, and bringing back things which later seem ordinary, but at the time seem miracles. Well, it was exactly that. I mean, it was the other world, the outer world. And I think at this point it wasn't so much that people would go there. That would be a later notion,

but that they would get reliable sources from people who had reliable sources. sources. So there was an attempt to check it, but not to check it by actually going there and looking at it. You say that this filtered in to others. Can I turn to you, Lauren? Aristotle and Pliny took up the unicorn. Can you tell us about each of those in turn? Yes. For Aristotle and Pliny, as Juliet said, the unicorn lives in India. And part of what's interesting is that Aristotle is he's asking, why do animals, why do some beasts have horns? And as he goes through the explanations for why some animals have horns, he says, and there are animals with one horn,

and these are, they come in two sorts. There is the sort with a single hoof, and there's the sort with a cloven hoof, and the one is an Indian ass, and the other is this oryx thing. And Pliny does something very different. He says this creature has the body, of the horse, a tail

of a boar, it bellows with a loud voice, it has the head of a deer-type creature, and it has a single horn. What he's describing is a rhinoceros. But for both of them, this creature lives in India, and they're trying to fit it into a kind of sequence,

an explanation of the way the natural world works. If he's talking about, was there no distinction then between a rhinoceros and what might have been a unicorn, was that a rhinoceros even stranger than the unicorn? You said, of course, he was describing your rhinoceros, as if everybody around Plinystheim knew about rhinoceruses. And it's just a bit of a pity there was a fudge.

But what was going on there? What's going on? Why didn't they say it was a rhinoceros if he thought it was right? If he was describing a rhinoceros, if he knew by it to rhinoceros, why didn't he call it to rhinoceros? The reason I said it was a rhinoceros is because that's how you hold the image in your head of this thing that has a tail of a boar and a giant body.

I mean, that's what makes sense. The problem is to try to work out the single animal. And what they have is all these different reports of all these exotic creatures that are very, very far away. And they end up being told all together in these sequences where they try to make sense of what is a big animal that has one horn. What is this thing? I'm sorry, did this must be really important.

boring for you but still. Did they know about rhinoceruses? Some people had seen rhinoceruses, some people had seen the Indian ass, some people had seen the aryx, and there were reports that came back and all these sort of yak-like things. These reports would have come back in various different forms. Did the ancient world, I mean, given to classifying after Aristotle, did anybody sit down and say, let's look at these different ones and see how they compare and contrast? I don't think anybody went out with a notebook to the field and trekked around and looked at these things, no. But I'm not certain. There's the white rhinoceros

But I'm told that was confined to Africa So that wouldn't come into the count I thought we were talking about imaginary animals I'm sorry I'm sort of dogged by a feeling That they've got to be some reality somewhere I do apologise We've come to imagination in a minute

But I'm sorry about that The white rhinoceros Wasn't part of their observation at all I think people had seen the white rhinoceros I mean I live in the 17th century I know we'll get to the 17th century In the 17th century, people say there are multiple animals in multiple parts of the world, all of which fit these descriptions of a beast which has a single horn.

What we're looking for is a creature that has extraordinary powers and a single horn and may or may not have solid feet. That's what we're looking for. Yeah, you did. It was a good side step to say we're talking about imaginary animals. But actually, we're not, because they weren't talking about imaginary animals. You know they went. They say, out there in Tibet, I've been there, you have no, somebody's stone, but there is this thing called unicorn.

So they're saying it's really there. That's important for us to register. Yes, but there's a question of, does it really have mythical powers? And is there only one beast? And that is the thing that gets debated for centuries. That's later, though. We're coming to that in about 10 minutes. We're trying to establish where the people thought it really did exist.

I've said enough there. If I only entered the Bible, how did that happen? It entered the Bible because, Now we're roughly in, we're in Alexandria now. We've left India and now we're in Alexandria and we're around the third century. And we have the Hebrew text of the Bible and Ptolemy the second says,

we need to get this translated into Greek. And so he gets a team of people as the story goes and he has them all translate the Bible. And there are a series of passages in which there is a beast described under the word, a word, I do not have Hebrew, but it's a word something like RIM. And there's this beast described, which from the context, has horns, but is not a cow. It's not a bull.

And so they're trying to work out what it is. So they give this beast the name, I think they give it the name Monosaurus. And that is how the unicorn, monosaurus is the Greek for the Latin unicorn, ends up in the Bible. So in the King James version of the Bible, you have unicorns all over the place because that would be the way to translate these terms into the English version.

Do you want me to talk about what we think the ream really was? Yes, please. Okay. So the ream seems to have been, so in the 17th century, there's a whole bunch of philological work going on. And it is suggested that the ream is actually a word rim. And a rim is, if I've remembered them in the right sequence, rim is an oryx. Somebody else might correct me if I'm wrong. And then in the

19th century, there's more philological, more language work goes on. And they say, actually, a ream is a rimu, and a rimu is an ox of some sort. And this fits the context of the Bible. And there's lots of work going on looking at the actual animals in their geographical specificity. So what did the Old Testament people actually have knowledge of? David Exergent, let's go back to the early Christian era. There's a book called Physiologous or Logius.

What does that tell us about the unicorn? And when did that come out? I think people believe it's second century. And it's a book of stories about the account of the natural world. It's a kind of natural history. And there are two major discussions of what the unicorn does. And already, as said, it's a fierce beast which you cannot normally take. The only way you can take it is if you have a virgin and the unicorn will calm itself.

and fall besotted into the virgin's lap in a kind of, sometimes in a sleep or a trance, and then you leap upon it and capture it. The other major story is to do with this business of being an antidote to poison, and there is a suggestion that because evil creatures like serpents would contaminate water, and so you'd then have a poisoned pool,

if the unicorn dips its horn into the water or indeed makes the sign of the cross over the water that purifies the water. I hesitate to bring reality into this because I've been tried it for that already but never mind. Was there any basis for this? I'm not mocking it because people were brilliant in those days because some people are brilliant today

but was there any other... What was the basis for this that it purified water? had anybody tried it, had anybody... What was it? Well, I suspect the part of the point was that people were very concerned about being poisoned. And so all sorts of different things over time have been regarded as protective, and actually rhinoceros horn as well. But it cannot have worked, so there was always a little problem there, I guess.

But I'm actually rather shocked that there are all these people telling me the unicorn doesn't exist. I mean, this is the news to be. Now, the virgin and the unicorn, the taming of the unicorn, it's now become an untamable, almost unkillable, be save in one circumstance. You've talked about it. It developed, didn't it? It was a virgin sitting under a tree,

and then it went into theological law. Can you just develop that a bit, please? Well, that's right. There's a kind of natural history element, if you like, although, of course, we wouldn't think that it was going to work, that you wouldn't be able to tame unicorns with virgins. But then the whole introduction of a virgin and the unicorn and the association gets a kind of Christian flavor,

and different people have different sorts of interpretations of how it all fits together, which involve the incarnation, the coming of Christ into the world. Is that because of the magnetic force of Christianity pulling everything into its service in some way? Well, I think one of the other points is that people were very, very inclined quite profoundly to think of the natural world as having meaning. And so it's not just unicorns that aren't merely running about but have a meaning, but for example, also in these beast stories, the pelican is a creature that was believed to pluck out its breast,

to feed its young if there wasn't any food around. and so you have the idea that Christ is a pelican who gives up his life for the sins of the world and King Lear talks about his pelican daughters who are plucking his breast. The beast brings us to the medieval bestiary. Can you tell us about that and how the unicorn fitted into that galare?

Yes, the besturies in the 12th century and onward are in a sense a sort of repetitious. of what's going on in the physiologous or physiologists. But one of the interesting features of them is that at that point, their illuminated manuscripts, that's to say illustrated books, and we have a number of surviving illustrated versions of these different stories of all the beasts and of their characteristics and their stories. And if you look at the sequence of different representations of the unicorn,

it's quite striking in terms of what we've been discussing. not always the same creature. So sometimes it's a sort of a rhinocerosy thing. Sometimes the horn is straight and, as we would say, like our vision of the unicorn, but at other times it points backwards more like something like an oryxes.

Julia Wood, so in the best of you have both mythical and real creatures, I presume, and intermixed. Is the unicorn at that time, and David mentioned the 12th century, we're coming into the high noon of unicornism, which is between about 1,217. Is it becoming more and more a fabulous creature?

Well, they still think of it as a real creature. I mean, this is where we have problems because our notions of what is fabulous and what is real are very, very different from theirs. They were beginning to question. They were still curious about this creature because, of course, nobody ever actually saw it. And what the viciaries does, says it's called unicorn in Latin

and rhinoceros in Greek. And clearly they're not thinking of the animal that we think of as the rhinoceros. So they certainly do think it's real, but they do think that it's a very special creature. And this is why it is allegorized. All creatures are allegorized because all of nature was allegorized, but the unicorn, really, to an extreme degree. And you have this very complicated business of the unicorn in the incarnation, in which Gabriel is the hunter and the virgin is in the hortes conclusive, is in the enclosed garden, and here comes the unicorn. And in one very

dramatic one. The unicorn horn points to her heart, which is the incarnation. The word enters the Virgin's heart. So it was getting very, very specific. But at the same time, it was also becoming a secular allegory as well. An allegory of love, not just

charitas, not just religious love, but are more physical love as well. And the Middle Ages love to mix the two, that you had a mystic marriage and a real marriage. And this is the point where the unicorn becomes a beastiary figure who is exotic, a Christian allegorical figure who represents the incarnation, Christ, the Virgin, the whole business, and an indication of the triumph of love whereby the lover becomes

not just a lustful lover, but a bridegroom. And so you get a third layer added to this, and that's really where the unicorn just takes off. So you have a three-layered. You have the object of of inquiry, although adulation or admiration, really. All three. All three. And then it's layered with different interpretations, almost different schools of meaning, which all converge. They do.

The virgin under the tree seems to be the point of convergence. It does. And the virgin under the tree probably comes in from the Arabic. And when we get on to the 17th century, the whole business of the unicorn and its use in medicine is clearly coming from the Arabic. So this is where the major direction is. So you get this notion of the woman under the tree or sitting in the garden who is love, either the virgin who is the way that Christ is tamed to become human.

She is the future wife, is the way that the lover, the sort of lustful lover, is tamed to become a bridegroom. And she's a kind of fertility symbol, not in any sort of pagan sense, but in the sense that she is the source of all these riches, the source of all this life in, in the world. that sense. So you get this three-level notion of the unicorn and it never settles in one or the other. I mean, one of the things is very interesting about the unicorn mythology

is that it works on all of these levels, both independently and crossing over at the same time. It's quite an unusual myth. When Julia says it works on all these levels, can you give this some indication of how it works, how it went into

the general culture, or if it did go into the Are we talking about something that was almost enclosed with theologians, the church, and the highly educated and the courts? Or is this notion spreading around of the unicorn? My understanding, but the other two may need to come in here. My sense is that in the romance literature, this is becoming a story which is generally known. And from the natural philosophical side of things, what the scholars are doing is in all of the histories of animals. and all the natural histories than this one horn beast figures

to some extent or another. So this is still within the literate tradition, what I'm describing. I have no idea what is going on in the iconographic tradition or in the lay perceptions of or lay knowledge of the unicorn. But it is growing as a force of reference

in the high Middle Ages and continuing through the Middle Ages. My sense is that yes, in terms of basic Christian understanding it is. In that sense it is very interesting myth because you don't get a lot of lay folklore about the unicorn. It does tend

to stay within an art tradition, within a romance tradition, which is a fairly elite tradition. There are a couple of references in Shakespeare which suggests that it's beginning to get out where Sebastian in the Tempice says, now I can believe in unicorns, as if the belief was questioned. And there's a bit in Julius Caesar

where someone says he loves to hear how unicorns are deceived by trees, which is a which I think is possibly the only unicorn story, which is not necessarily in the elite tradition. And this is the idea that the lion can deceive the unicorn by ducking behind a tree at the last minute. So the unicorn kind of runs at him and gets his horn stuck in a tree. And it's a quite bizarre little story. But it's the only one that does seem to be out with this very, very formal, artistic, theological, allegorical, medical tradition.

So the answer is he's not a big folk character, but he's a very, very important elite character. Now, the elite world was expanding very dramatically. I don't mean just theologians and just readers of romance, but it isn't popular folklore. David, Dave Excergent, can we come to the illustrations, which Lauren mentioned, and perhaps the greatest illustrator,

certainly was Leonardo, how he took on the unicorn, what he did, with the unicorn? Yes, both of the stories I referred to earlier are there in Leonardo. There's a Leonardo drawing, little drawing, of a unicorn dipping its horn into water. And then the more interesting sheet really

represents a young woman who has a tethered unicorn on a kind of lead by her side. And this is a drawing in the Ashmolean in Oxford, which has Leonardo's own framing lines drawn round the image, which suggests that he was thinking in terms of transferring that directly into a painting, and there's quite a plausible idea that that painting might have been intended for the back of a double-sided portrait, which would have had an image of a chased young woman

on the front. There is a painting by Leonardo from the right kind of period, his early years in Florence, Geneva de Benchie. It's a great masterpiece in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It has something else on the back, but it is, again, it's double-sided. So one of the suggestions is that maybe this was his first idea, his sort of dummy run for the back of that portrait. And he wrote about it too, didn't he? Yes, he also writes in his notebooks about the unicorn and tells much the same kind of stories as other people about it being a fierce creature that can only be taken when the hunters have to be. persuaded it into the lap of a virgin.

So what does it say to you about the unicorn that Leonardo is, as it were, bringing it into his repertoire? Well, I think in the context of Leonardo, one has no sense that he doubts it at all. He just regards it as one of the creatures that must exist. And that seems to have been in the visual tradition, quite generally the case. People very regularly in different kinds of,

contexts illustrate unicorns. But what is also interesting is they don't all do it the same way. So there's a marvellous medal dating from 1447 by Pizanello, who's the father of the medal, of a chaste

nun, Chichelia Gonzaga. She's on one side of the medal and on the back is a nude figure of a woman, not really a portrait of her, because nuns don't go around in the nude, with a ghost. a goat-like creature, but with a horn.

And then again, Dura, in 1516, produces an extraordinary etching of an abduction, a man sort of dragging off a woman on the back of a unicorn. And that unicorn doesn't have that spiraling straight horn that we think of as being the standard on. It's got a curve torn. So he, too, has a third option, as it were,

for the visual appearance of the unicorn. And it's also the subject, the unicorn's subject, two wonderful sets of tapestries, were the one in Paris in the Miseiklunee, and now renamed as National Something or other, and that was about 1,500, and the one in the cloisters in New York.

Which is about the same time. About the same time, yes. The cloisters, was my first contact with the unicorn as I grew up there. I think let's just stick to the cloisters then. Can you just say what happens in those, for those who haven't been there? hunt. And this is a special aspect. It's massive, isn't it? It is. There are seven of them, of which six have survived in bits of one of the others. And the mystic hunt, the hunt of the unicorn is the fusion of the religious and the courtly imagery of the unicorn. Because the unicorn starts off sort of running wild. And in this hunt series, you can see it sort of putting its horn in the fountain. And all around the fountain are other beasts.

who are just waiting for the fountain to be cleared of poison so that they can come and drink. So the unicorn is, in a sense, very, very special. Now, the other beasts are all paired. There are always two of them, where there's only one of the unicorn. Then you have the unicorn actually being hunted and sort of kicking the hounds

and sort of being terribly, terribly fierce. Now, the cloisters one is actually missing the one with the unicorn on the lady's lap. That's the one that has been destroyed. But we know it was there because there's a picture of the unicorn's neck with a lady's hand on it. So clearly she tamed the unicorn. Then there's the unicorn actually being killed. And in the final tapestry, the unicorn is sitting underneath a pomegranate tree in an enclosed garden surrounded by flowers.

And that one seems to have been smaller to fit above a bed. So what we're dealing with is a marriage tapestry, the hunt of the lover and the taming of the lover by the lady. And the last unicorn has a collar around its neck, a beautiful jeweled collar. So it has been tamed but revived. So you have the notion of Christ incarnated and resurrected. The lover dying and being reborn in the love of the lady. And the lady as central, both in a religious sense and in a secular sense. Lauren, these two lots of tapestries would have been extraordinarily expensive at the time by comparison with other works about, and commissioned by obviously very rich people.

What does this suggest? This suggests that the unicorn is becoming merely fashionable, or people think, oh, what a good subject, or is it a way of telling particular stories that is especially commanding? Can I defer this to David? This is his area of expertise. David, need I repeat the question?

No, I think the strange thing is that the Cloisters series which we've heard about represents the hunting and the capture of the unicorn and the things we know about. The sequence in the Muzi de Cluny is very different because it represents the five senses. So there are five tapestries, each of which is devoted to a sense. So touch, for example, the lady,

there's always a lady with her attendant, her female attendant, and she's holding the horn of the unicorn. She's touching the horn of the unicorn sight. the unicorn is admiring himself in a mirror and so on. So you have the five senses, and then you have a kind of final piece with an inscription saying,

Amoursel Desire, to my only desire, to my only love, if you like. So there's a sort of almost romantic notion going on there. But the luxury of the tapestries, I think must also relate in some way, the fact that the unicorn as an object was a very pricey number. Do we know who commissioned them? We certainly know the family who commissioned the ones in Cluny

because there are coats of arms all over the place, and they're called the Le Vist family. There seems to be a certain amount of disagreement as to whether it's one of them called Jean or one of them called Antoine, who actually commissioned them. But we know who it was there. And there have been suggestions at the very least that the cloister set was for Anne of Brittany, who was the Queen of France, also around 1,500 her said, who got married for the second time.

She was a sort of serial queen of France. She was married to Charles VIII, and then she also married Louis XIV, in 1499. So the dating is about right. Lauren, why did the potency of the unicorn, its potency as a religious symbol, appears to have been high, and then he began to decline in the 16th century. Can you describe that arc for us, please? Well, there seems to be an increasing interest in its horn,

and this seems to be because, as it's in the 16th century, that trade routes begin to be opened up, people begin to go and see animals in different places in the world, explorers and the people who travel with them, the scholars who travel with them, send back reports of what they have seen and actual objects. So you have opening up a set of, a market for, as it were, a unicorn horn. It's been a luxury product since at least the 12th century, but it becomes a substance which is being traded more regularly. And this seems to be, so there seem to be several things going on here in the 16th century.

which, to get back to your question, account for this shift in a concern about what is unicorn and what is unicorn horn, which has to do with commercialization and also with the change in the way that natural history as a scholarly subject is done. So did the increased capitalization of the horn or monetization, as people would say nowadays, deplete its religious significance? I don't know, but Juliet does. It was quite deliberate. That's a very sophisticated, really rather strange interpretation, the incarnation with the whole business. And after the Protestant Reformation, it's just the sort of thing that made Protestants uncomfortable.

It even made Catholics uncomfortable. And after the Council of Trent, which is the 17th century, that aspect of using the incarnation and the unicorn story was abandoned. So you have a turning away from the religious element. a decline in the interest of romance and obviously a change that these romantic elites these courtly elites were being replaced. So you have those two sources

of unicorn imagery disappearing for various reasons, but there's still an interest in the horn and there's still an interest in the unicorn as a heraldic device. Can I just pick up there because one of the things that happens is that in Gesner's history of animals,

he says this is in the 16th century, he tells the story about the virgin capturing the unicorn, but the way that he tells it is to mock it. He says that the way you do a unicorn hunt is you dress a boy up as a girl and so forth, and it becomes sort of Shakespearean farce. And this sort of illustrates exactly the point

that Juliet is making, that this part of the story falls away at the same time as Gesner says, this is what the unicorn is, and these are the medicinal things you can do with it. But trade in what was called the unicorn horn itself, grew to what can probably use the word fabulistic extent around this time,

it did, it did. The most popular thing, or what we think of characteristically is the unicorn horn, is the long twisted narwhal tusk. Now the narwhal is a small whale confined really to the Greenland waters. They tend not to come south.

So people wouldn't have known that they existed unless they lived up there. And they traded through intermediaries. Originally through the Vikings, but eventually through the Danes. The Danish throne was made of Norwal Tusks because it was such a popular and profitable trade.

Interestingly, it becomes profitable at the same time that unicorn horn takes off as alicorn as a medicine, rather than anything else. Tell us about alicorn. Well, alicorn is what the horn became known as and what the medicines that were made out of the horn became known as. And again, it's

almost as if this story is going into a different direction when you kind of lose the business of the Virgin and the mystic hunt, although heraldry still holds on to some of some of that. Can we talk just a bit more, Lauren, about its value in Renaissance medicine, where its value came, how it came to be into Renaissance medicine. Juliet, I think it was, or mentioned earlier, that this came through the, through developments in the Arab world, as we know, they took on medicine very strongly in those four or five hundred

years when they took on a lot from the Greeks. Can you just tell us how that wound through from them to their Renaissance? Yes, I mean, the important distinction here is that the ancient Greek sources do not mention the medicinal value of unicorn horn. That's not part of what they're interested in. And you have the Arabic sources where you use the horn to drink out of it, neutralizes the poison. There are various different ways it's explained of doing that. And when you get to the Renaissance, Arabic medicine is being translated. It's very prevalent in 16th, 17th.

century Europe. And it becomes sort of standard to have either shards of horn, unicorn horn, that you would put in in usually a wine and you would drink and that would purge you of poison. Or you could get it in powdered form. People were suspicious about the powdered form more than the shard form. Most people didn't have the means to get hold of a whole horn. Now, the way this work, is that human and animal ingredients are part of the standard pharmacy. It's not unusual to have, you know, sparrows, brains, or stags, pizzles, or other such things that do you good. They're medicines, and they're part of the pharmacopoeia.

The reasoning with horns is that horns of any sort come from beasts which are earthy in their disposition. So this is the elemental, the humoral medicine. And things which are earthy are, these creatures produce a horn, which often they drop, and it's seen that stags drop their horns. This is seen as a form of sort of excrement. It's getting this out of its body. It corresponds to earth. Earth is hot and moist. Therefore, these horns have this hot and moist quality.

And whether you as it's debated in the 16th and 70th centuries to a chemical medicine or a humoral medicine, and this set of properties can purge you of poisons in some form or another, depending on the recipe that's followed. So it's part of the general dispensary, really, isn't it? It is part of the general. There are noble women's medicine chests that are inventoried where you have all of these ingredients, including a little box of unicorn horn. So this, David, is being traded.

Julie's hinted that it is a fake, it's now, from the most of it or all of it is from this Arctic well known only around Greenland and controlled by the Danes who are keeping mum about this and they're selling it on as Unicorn Horn Nevertheless it takes off

in terms of being believed to be Unicorn Horn and having great values Can you give us some examples of that say from Elizabeth the First and Benevito Chalini? Yes Melville in maybe Dick refers to the story connected with

Queen Elizabeth. Martin Frobisher supposedly brought back a unicorn horn and it was presented with a splendid mount because evidently you'd have to have something upon which it would rest or sit would have been held upright and that allegedly cost 10,000 pounds and then there's this marvellous store. Is it possible to translate that into now or not? Well, I think you could put plenty of noughts on the end of that and be very sure that you you're getting mega values. The story in Benvenuti Chalini's autobiography is very splendid because he relates how he went into battle with another goldsmith

for the competition to produce the mount for a unicorn horn, which had been acquired by Pope Clement the 7th after the sack of Rome. This is after 1527. And Clement was going to give the finished product, so to speak, to Francois Prémyer, the King of France. And Chalini says that this horn was the most splendid and most beautiful unicorn horn that had ever been seen and that it, this is without any of the workmanship for the mount,

cost 17,000 ducats. Now, to give an indication of how much money that was, Michelangelo's original deal for the entire Sistine Chapel ceiling was 3,000 ducats. He probably got a bit more later on because he'd made a more complicated design. But the idea that one unicorn horn is worth five plus 16 chapels is rather stunning. And Benvenito Chilini in the competition won the day.

Yeah, well, Benvenuio to Chilini in his autobiography always won the day as a matter of that. But he had the idea of doing the head of a unicorn. That was his scheme, a bejeweled head for the unicorns. Juliet Wood, did the symbolic meaning of the unicorn change in the Renaissance? I think it isn't so much that it changed, is that it's sort of concentrated on one element, and this is the notion of the unicorn partly as indicating the chastity and the nobility of women,

which is where you get those pictures with women with unicorns on their lap, and they look a bit like lap dogs. But more to the point, the strength of the unicorn, in heraldry. And very often you will see the unicorn with a broken chain, which may refer to canst thou chain the unicorn. And the idea is that the unicorn has broken free of captivity and like the noble family will remain. It's in our health, right, too, isn't?

It is. You also get it very interestingly as an apothecary symbol and in paper watermarks, where it's relating back to this notion that the water is pure as paper was made of water. The unicorn would indicate the purity and the value of the paper. Lauren, I'm sorry about this, but this is back to a sort of reality.

In the 17th century, some apparently strong evidence emerged for the existence of unicorns in Magdeburg. Can you tell us about that? There was a fossilized, I believe it was a mammoth found in or near some caves, and they took it out and assembled it, and somebody had the idea to put a horn from a narwhal on the top of it.

So, I mean, this is an age when, what we think of as geology is changing. They are, fossils are, and fossilized bones are being found. They'd always been in existence, but they're being interpreted differently. So this seemed to be a unicorn, and there were people who thought it was a unicorn. But this has to be seen in all of the literature, which says, there's not one unicorn and there's not one unicorn horn. And even if there is a creature that does us, we don't know it has the mythical powers

that are ascribed to it. Finally, David, there was real downing about it. Even among the Danes, and they turned to a major physician of the day in the 17th century, Oly Vaugham, to say about these things, are they unicorn? And he said, no, they come from Wales off Greenland. Did that bust the market? No, it didn't instantly bust the market. Surprise, surprise.

And actually, since there was a tendency to believe that marine creatures had counterpart's on Earth, the fact that he recognised the unicorn horn as coming from the narwhal didn't mean he was completely sure there wasn't a unicorn somewhere else with a rather similar horn. But didn't people who'd paid millions and millions and millions

as many notes as you indicated for the unicorn horn said, crank it comes from a whale up Greenland and can I trade it back then? Well, I think by then it was probably too late. But the other thing that's really fascinating, I have to say, is I would imagine that many people listening to us,

don't know what a owl looks like. Honestly, if you lined up a picture of an arwal and a picture of our conventional notion of a unicorn, which is not very different from a horse with a horn on the end of its head, the narwhal looks much more weird and peculiar and inconceivable as a matter of fact than the poor old unicorn. Down the line will do something on the novel.

It is called to see unicorn. Well, thank you very much, Judith Wood, Lauren Castle and David Excergen. Next week we'll be talking about the role of women in Enlightenment Science. Thank you very much for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research.

To find out more, visit bbc.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4.