gems, corundum, History.1, carbuncle, legends, lore, garnet, spinel, Rome, carbuncle in Roman literature, definition of carbuncle

In 1892, Conan Doyle published a Sherlock Holmes mystery titled The Blue Carbuncle. To the modern reader, the title reads like an oxymoron, since the carbuncle has been regarded since Antiquity as the red gemstone par excellence. So is this a mistake by the famous English author? Or is the color of the carbuncle ultimately secondary to its brilliance? One must be wary of received ideas: in the collective imagination, the carbuncle is renowned for its red hue. But what do the medieval texts—more precisely, the lapidaries—actually say in their entries on the carbuncle? At once easy to identify and hard to define, the carbuncle carries multiple symbolic meanings, linked to the color red and to Christian religion. While the textual tradition appears stable, the carbuncle is sometimes confused with other stones, such as the ruby and the dracontite. Drawing on a corpus of texts from the 12th to the 15th century, we will trace the variations of the stone, following the shifting contours of the texts.