Abstract:This essay takes a material culture approach to the fate of the unicorn, that ultimate symbol of irrationality and credulity, in the natural history collection of the age of enlightenment. Exploring the interplay between unicorn horns, narwhals, rhinos, and other kinds of horn present in the eighteenth-century French collection, it shows that in fact unicorns never disappeared from the cabinet but rather presided over new narratives of what enlightenment was about. Further, it argues that this change in the status of unicorns was associated with changing patterns of the global whaling industry, which made narwhal horns widely available to Europeans and the narwhal into a natural historical object. What real objects could, or could not, be represented in the collection as specimens had an important bearing upon the credibility of animal kinds outside the space of the cabinet, yet within that space, the juxtaposition and financial value of specimens produced important narratives of the relationship between horn specimens and natural species like rhinos and narwhals existing in the real world—species which never completely shed their fictive character, like the unicorn itself.

中文翻译：

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论开明橱柜中独角兽角的讽刺标本

摘要：本文从物质文化的角度探讨了启蒙时代博物学收藏中独角兽的命运，独角兽是非理性和轻信的终极象征。探索 18 世纪法国收藏中出现的独角兽角、独角鲸、犀牛和其他种类的角之间的相互作用，它表明事实上独角兽从未从橱柜中消失，而是主持了关于启蒙运动的新叙事。此外，它认为独角兽地位的这种变化与全球捕鲸业模式的变化有关，这使得欧洲人可以广泛使用独角鲸的角，并将独角鲸变成一个自然的历史对象。什么真实物体可以或不能，