Killer Rabbits in Medieval Manuscripts: Why So Many Drawings in the Margins Depict Bunnies Going Bad

In all the king­dom of nature, does any crea­ture threat­en us less than the gen­tle rab­bit? Though the ques­tion may sound entire­ly rhetor­i­cal today, our medieval ances­tors took it more seri­ous­ly — espe­cial­ly if they could read illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts, and even more so if they drew in the mar­gins of those man­u­scripts them­selves. “Often, in medieval man­u­scripts’ mar­gin­a­lia we find odd images with all sorts of mon­sters, half man-beasts, mon­keys, and more,” writes Sexy Cod­i­col­o­gy’s Mar­jolein de Vos. “Even in reli­gious books the mar­gins some­times have draw­ings that sim­ply are mak­ing fun of monks, nuns and bish­ops.” And then there are the killer bun­nies.

Hunt­ing scenes, de Vos adds, also com­mon­ly appear in medieval mar­gin­a­lia, and “this usu­al­ly means that the bun­ny is the hunt­ed; how­ev­er, as we dis­cov­ered, often the illu­mi­na­tors decid­ed to change the roles around.”

Jon Kaneko-James explains fur­ther: “The usu­al imagery of the rab­bit in Medieval art is that of puri­ty and help­less­ness – that’s why some Medieval por­tray­als of Christ have mar­gin­al art por­tray­ing a ver­i­ta­ble pet­ting zoo of inno­cent, non­vi­o­lent, lit­tle white and brown bun­nies going about their busi­ness in a field.” But the cre­ators of this par­tic­u­lar type of humor­ous mar­gin­a­lia, known as drollery, saw things dif­fer­ent­ly.

“Drol­leries some­times also depict­ed comedic scenes, like a bar­ber with a wood­en leg (which, for rea­sons that escape me, was the height of medieval com­e­dy) or a man saw­ing a branch out from under him­self,” writes Kaneko-James.

This enjoy­ment of the “world turned upside down” pro­duced the drollery genre of “the rab­bit’s revenge,” one “often used to show the cow­ardice or stu­pid­i­ty of the per­son illus­trat­ed. We see this in the Mid­dle Eng­lish nick­name Stick­hare, a name for cow­ards” — and in all the draw­ings of “tough hunters cow­er­ing in the face of rab­bits with big sticks.”

Then, of course, we have the bun­nies mak­ing their attacks while mount­ed on snails, snail com­bats being “anoth­er pop­u­lar sta­ple of Drol­leries, with groups of peas­ants seen fight­ing snails with sticks, or sad­dling them and attempt­ing to ride them.”

Giv­en how often we denizens of the 21st cen­tu­ry have trou­ble get­ting humor from less than a cen­tu­ry ago, it feels sat­is­fy­ing indeed to laugh just as hard at these drol­leries as our medieval fore­bears must have — though many more of us sure­ly get to see them today, cir­cu­lat­ing as rapid­ly on social media as they did­n’t when con­fined to the pages of illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts owned only by wealthy indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions.

You can see more mar­gin­al scenes of the rab­bit’s revenge at Sexy Cod­i­col­o­gy, Colos­sal, and Kaneko-James’ blog. But one his­tor­i­cal ques­tion remains unan­swered: to what extent did they influ­ence that pil­lar of mod­ern cin­e­mat­ic com­e­dy, Mon­ty Python and the Holy Grail?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

The Aberdeen Bes­tiary, One of the Great Medieval Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts, Now Dig­i­tized in High Res­o­lu­tion & Made Avail­able Online

Medieval Cats Behav­ing Bad­ly: Kit­ties That Left Paw Prints … and Peed … on 15th Cen­tu­ry Man­u­scripts

Explo­sive Cats Imag­ined in a Strange, 16th Cen­tu­ry Mil­i­tary Man­u­al

David Lynch Made a Dis­turb­ing Web Sit­com Called “Rab­bits”: It’s Now Used by Psy­chol­o­gists to Induce a Sense of Exis­ten­tial Cri­sis in Research Sub­jects

Mon­ty Python and the Holy Grail Cen­sor­ship Let­ter: We Want to Retain “Fart in Your Gen­er­al Direc­tion”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.