What cunicular Hell? You may well ask,
lurks in the margins of otherwise coherent
medieval documents and it's not apparent,
to twenty-first century eyes, quite why
the bunny-eared crew should freak out so
completely. When leporines attack!
Do peasants stumble back: their former
food and fur supply rotating on the spot
and reaching out for weapons. The world turned upside down
is pretty much the message here these 'drolleries’
or ‘grotesques' as codicology explains
are symbols for our base biology.
Characters of cowardice and innocence; helpless,
and sexual. However, let's be clear
there can be nothing evil here
because rabbits don't do evil
(even when they eat their young). There is no evil
to preying on the leaves of grass
and even though medieval sex talk
has the wolves jumping on rabbits:
there was no fall there either. Animals
get on with it and don't reflect
on whether they are good or bad
or saved or damned. Those thoughts belong
in only the human version
of the story and even when the fox dines
there is no misbehaviour there.
That way of seeing's purely our perversion.
Reference material and some words taken from: Why Are There Violent Rabbits In The Margins Of Medieval Manuscripts?
Yep, applying any moral or other philosophical purpose behind anything any animal does is a pure act of anthropomorphic projection :) .. and yeh, those old medieval border scribbles and inclusions can be very strange .. like the one of a man playing a horn with his bottom! :D
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