The Curious History of Your Home · NOISER

Jewellery

July 22, 2024·34 min·2 clips

Martin Luther marries an ex-nun in a secret nighttime ceremony, fearing public backlash.

The episode opens with a dramatised scene of Martin Luther's clandestine 1525 wedding to Katharina von Bora, a former nun, using wedding rings as an entry point into the history of jewellery. Ruth Goodman introduces herself as the host, explaining her focus on the hidden histories of everyday objects. The earliest known jewellery is a 142,000-year-old necklace of marine snail shells found in a Moroccan cave in 2018, suggesting Stone Age hunters wore jewellery as status symbols and lucky charms. Ancient Egyptians took jewellery to extremes, with pharaohs wearing gold and silver on ears and fingers, while poorer Egyptians used painted clay and feathers. Egyptian charm bracelets featured symbolic amulets — lions' teeth for courage, frogs for fertility, crocodile figurines for protection. The Book of the Dead specified what jewellery to place on the deceased, including the heart scarab, placed over the heart to prevent it betraying the dead person's secrets in the afterlife. Jewellery traditions extended across the Indus Valley civilisation and to the Mayan and Inca civilisations of the Americas, where jade was offered to gods and gold was considered the sweat of the sun. Spanish conquistadors melted an estimated $60 million worth of Inca gold in 1533. In ancient Rome, women wore long sharp hairpins called bodkins for self-defence; historical accounts describe Fulvia piercing Cicero's tongue and a widow blinding her husband's murderer with such pins. The medieval period introduced poison rings with concealed compartments for killing enemies, though historians now doubt Lucrezia Borgia actually used one. Gemstones were assigned medicinal properties in the Middle Ages: diamonds warded off plague, sapphires cured snakebites, amethysts prevented drunkenness. In 1912, a demolition crew in Cheapside, London discovered a wooden chest containing around 500 jewels including Indian diamonds, Colombian emeralds and Burmese rubies, believed to have been hidden by a jeweller during the English Civil War and lost after the Great Fire of 1666. The Victorian era saw Queen Victoria's grief for Albert transform mourning jewellery into a fashion, with lockets, hair jewellery and jet gemstones proliferating. In the 20th century, jewellers like Cartier and Tiffany shaped modern luxury, while De Beers aggressively marketed diamonds through celebrity imagery. The episode culminates with the 2003 Antwerp Diamond Centre heist, in which four thieves used hairspray, heat shields, and a copied vault key to steal over $100 million in diamonds, a crime that remains largely unsolved. The ringleader, Leonardo Nota Bartolo, was arrested on the basis of a salami sandwich receipt, but most of the stolen diamonds were never recovered. The episode closes by reflecting on the continuity of jewellery's purposes across history — status, love, religion, magic — and previews the next episode on toilets.

As heard by us

A lively survey of jewellery as adornment, status, faith, and harm.

Jewellery is treated here as more than decoration, moving through status, faith, and harm with a sweep that begins on Martin Luther's wedding day in Wittenberg and ranges back to Roman bodkins, self-defence, and medieval rings with hidden poison compartments.

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Press play for jewelry history that moves from Roman bodkins to medieval poison rings.

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