04/05/2026
Years ago while a student at the University of Vermont, I unexpectedly fell in love with medieval literature and Middle English, especially works by Chaucer and the fascinating art found in illuminated manuscripts. Maybe it’s partially because I’m a “bunny momma,” but I get such a kick out of the role reversal of the powerful and the powerless shown through fierce bunnies! 👑🐰🐇⚔️
Happy Easter. Here is your reminder that the Easter Bunny has its origins in killer and sadistic medieval bunnies.
Before the chocolate eggs and the pastel baskets, the medieval rabbit was something else entirely. Flip through enough 13th and 14th-century illuminated manuscripts held in the British Library and the Bibliothèque de Verdun, and you will find something deeply strange in the margins. Rabbits. Enormous, furious, heavily armed rabbits. Rabbits wielding axes at kings. Rabbits laying siege to castles. Rabbits shooting hunters in the spine with bows and arrows, tying them up, hauling them before a rabbit judge, receiving a guilty verdict, and joyfully beheading them. Rabbits roasting hunters over open fires and boiling their hounds. One rabbit, in the Smithfield Decretals illuminated in London in the 1340s, presides over an entire multi-page revenge sequence that unfolds like a comic strip across the manuscript margins. It is extraordinarily violent, meticulously illustrated, and clearly someone's idea of a very good joke.
These images are called drolleries, and they belong to a tradition that peaked between 1250 and the 15th century, drawn in the margins of serious religious texts by the monks copying them. The concept is called le monde renversé, the world turned upside down. Medieval artists loved depicting reality in reverse, hunters being hunted, prey becoming predator, the powerful made powerless. Rabbits, being the most docile and frequently eaten animals in the medieval world, were the perfect candidates for this role reversal. In real life they were on the menu at every feast and hunted daily with dogs and arrows. In the margins of manuscripts they got their revenge in spectacular and extremely graphic fashion. The earliest known killer rabbit, found in the Arnstein Passional from around 1170, shows two rabbits who have hanged a human hunter and are standing on their hind legs pointing and jeering at the body.
Not everyone found this funny. The Cistercian monk Bernard of Clairvaux complained about the drolleries in terms that feel remarkably modern, asking what these ridiculous monstrosities were doing in the cloisters and what purpose was served by such unclean monkeys, fierce lions, and monstrous centaurs. He also noted, with some irritation, that even if the foolishness caused no shame, one might at least balk at the expense. He had a point. These books were extraordinarily costly to produce. Someone was spending serious money on manuscripts decorated with rabbits committing war crimes.
So this Easter Sunday, as the Easter Bunny delivers chocolate eggs to well-behaved children everywhere, know that it was not always thus. For several hundred years the medieval version of the Easter rabbit was carrying an axe, had an outstanding grievance against humanity, and was depicted in the margins of the most sacred books in Christendom getting extremely satisfying revenge. The Monty Python killer bunny was not just an invention; it was a history lesson....
-Donnie
eatshistory.com
Happy Easter!
