Inheriting madness: professionalization and psychiatric knowledge in nineteenth-century France

Abstract

Unicornis has featured widely as a mythical animal and has given rise to many fantasies.There has been much speculation about its identity, but the oryx must be the favourite . . .In Africa and Arabia there are several species of oryx.The Arabian oryx is about the size of the ibex, has big feet for walking on sand and long slender annulated horns.The horns are soft in the young oryx and often get damaged or deformed during growth.The result can be the reduction of one horn to a curly insignificant stump.Thus the oryx becomes the unicorn.(p.87.)While some mention is made of its mythology, the wonder of the unicorn and the richness of the traditions associated with it, for example that is was a symbol of Christ hunted from heaven by the angel Gabriel, is lost among the details about the way the creature is depicted by the artists of the different families of bestiaries.At other points the discussions are heavily literal and chiefly paraphrases and translations of the bestiary entries about the animal:

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 69 citations exist upstream.