Many folks will soon celebrate Easter, and so I invite you to fall down the best sort of rabbit’s hole and investigate — Medieval bunnies! And sex, purity, hermaphrodites, and the Virgin Mary, because those things all co-existed in Medieval and Early Modern culture. The painting here, the “Madonna of the Rabbit,” painted by Titian in 1530, illustrates my point exactly.
First let’s get to the issue of the connection of bunnies with Easter, which is hecking complicated. In the 19th century one of the Brothers Grim, of folklorist fame, wrote that the Easter Bunny traditions were likely tied to a connection of worship of a pagan Germanic fertility Goddess, but he was taking a “leap” (get it?) in logic connecting the English “Eostre” (whose springtime pagan rituals the 8th-century scholar Bede thought had been appropriated by Christians) to bunnies.
Rabbits certainly make lots of babies quickly and Medieval people knew it. Medieval sources record that hares (equated with rabbits) could become pregnant whilst already carrying another litter, which in scientific terminology is called “superfetation.” The Medieval Bestiaries often attest that rabbits were hermaphrodites, believing that “they gender without males,and have both sexes, male and female; therefore many men suppose that the Conie (rabbit) is gendered and gendered without male” (Bartolomaeus Anglicus 13th century) — this amounts to parthenogenesis, which of course is how Christians also believed the Virgin Mary conceived. Thus, associations of whiteness/purity, rabbits, and and the Virgin Mary existed.
But Medieval and Early Modern people didn’t always equate rabbits with virgin births — quite the opposite idea co-existed. The fecundity of bunnies also brought about an association of these animals with lust — in fact, the name “conyes” in Middle English for rabbit was a play on words for the Latin “cuniculus”/rabbit and “cunnus”/female genetalia. The Ancient Romans had associated the hare with the Gods Eros and Venus of love and sexuality, so there’s a long tradition there.
In the Early Modern period rabbits even got associated with witchcraft, as folks believed that witches could turn into bunnies!
Sources: _Smithsonian_, “The Ancient Origins of the Easter Bunny,” Tok Thompson, April 14, 2022. Website “Medieval Bestiary” under “Hare”. Medieval Studies Notre Dame: Research Blog,”Medieval Rabbits: Ancient Symbolism, English Migration, and Manuscript Marginalia,” March 22, 2024, Emily McLore.
