"I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom. I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients." Gustave Courbet

16 April 2022

Egg-Bearing.


The first known mention of the Easter bunny or Easter hare in print was in a 1682 doctoral dissertation in Latin, the language of academia at the time. Georg Franck von Franckenau (1644-1704), a German medical doctor and botanist, taught anatomy, chemistry and botany at Jena and became Professor of Medicine at the University of Heidelberg in 1679. Following a French invasion in the War of the Palatinate Succession he left Heidelberg for Frankfurt and then the University of Wittenberg. Franckenau later moved to Denmark as the personal physician to Christian V in Copenhagen, where he died on June 17, 1704.

In 1682, while still at Heidelberg, under the name of Johannes Richier, one of his doctoral candidates, Professor Franck published a 16-page dissertation titled “De Ovis Paschalibus. Von Oster-Eyern.” (“On Easter Eggs”), which mentions for the first time the existence of the folk belief in an egg-bearing Easter bunny found in Protestant regions of Alsace and the Palatinate (Elsass und die Pfalz). In some other German-speaking regions the bringer of Easter eggs was a fox, a rooster, or the cuckoo bird. In English translation, part of the dissertation reads: “In Alsace, and neighboring regions, these eggs are called rabbit eggs because of the myth told to fool simple people and children that the Easter Bunny is going around laying eggs and hiding them in the herb gardens."

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