Smelly Unicorns
What I made: I illuminated a scroll for a Kingdom-level award, the Golden Quill.
What it recognizes: It is awarded to people who create beautiful calligraphy and illumination on scrolls for the love of it, and use this skill to serve the kingdom and its people.
This illumination features traced linework. The design is courtesy of Jadwiga Radomyskowa of An Tir.
Medieval Source: "Smell" The Lady and The Unicorn Tapestries
The Tapestry Breakdown: Flowers, Monkeys, and Mythical Beasts
If you look closely at this medieval masterpiece, the scene is less of a casual backyard hang-out and more of an ultra-packed allegorical flexing contest.
The Flower Crown: The Lady is standing in an enclosed garden, busy weaving a crown out of carnations. Enclosed gardens were the medieval shorthand for total purity and paradise, inspired by monastic "Mary Gardens" which only grew plants with holy virtues.
The VIP Guest: A literal unicorn stands nearby. In medieval times, unicorns were the Swiss Army knife of symbolism, representing chastity, purity, Christ, courtly love, healing, and chivalry.
The Plot Twist: How do we know this tapestry is about Smell? Because right there, sitting comfortably in a basket of flowers, is a monkey stealing a sniff of a blossom. Nothing says high art like a flower-sniffing primate.
The backdrop of this entire scene is stitched in the ultra-trendy mille-fleurs ("thousand flowers") style. It features a dense explosion of local flora, including pansies, daisies, daffodils, and lily of the valley.
Why So Many Flowers? (The Ultimate Room Freshener)
The mille-fleurs style didn't just come out of nowhere. It was inspired by a very practical medieval habit: strewing.
Because 15th-century floors were cold and the air often smelled like a lack of plumbing, people regularly dumped piles of fresh hay and flowers all over their homes, churches, and streets. On big holidays like Whit-Sunday, church wardens went on massive shopping sprees for greenery to smash under the feet of churchgoers. We know this from records the churches have kept.
Why stomp on perfectly good flowers? It was actually a highly effective system:
The Heavy-Hitting Herbs
Different plants served different purposes on the medieval floor:
The Pest Controllers: Tansy, lavender, and mint were the heavy hitters. Walking on them released strong scents that actively repelled rodents, fleas, and existential dread. Probably.
The Local Perfumes: Violets, apple mint, and meadow-sweet were thrown down simply because they were cheap, local, and smelled fantastic.
The Visual Flex: It celebrated spring and made the dark, drafty medieval rooms look incredibly cheery. Take that, winter.
Superstitions and Symbols
Flowers weren't just the Febreze of the 1500s; they were also security systems.
On May Day, people went out of their way to strew yellow flowers everywhere. Because yellow symbolized the sun, it was believed to act as a mystical forcefield to ward off witches, faeries, and evil spirits. If you had cows, you threw yellow flowers at them too, just to protect your livestock from the "evil eye."
Other flowers carried deeper meanings. Roses, naturally, symbolized divine love—a tradition of throwing petals that somehow survived the centuries and still plagues modern wedding venues today.
The Rest of the Sensory Squad
"Smell" is just one part of a six-piece set. If you wander through the Musée de Cluny, you will also run into the other five tapestries:
Taste: Where someone is usually eating.
Touch: Where the Lady actively grabs the unicorn's horn (very bold).
Sight: Where the unicorn looks at itself in a mirror.
Hearing: Featuring a very noisy portable organ.
À mon seul désir: Translating to "My sole desire," which leaves historians arguing to this day whether it represents a sixth sense (the heart/will) or just a lady putting her jewelry away.
So, the next time you light a scented candle, think of the Lady, her chaste unicorn, and the little monkey sitting in a basket of carnations, keeping the smells of the 15th century at bay.
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