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Tawny Paul, Karen Harvey. The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England., The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 1, March 2023, Pages 444–446, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad038
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In 1726, a young female laborer in a rural English town began giving birth to rabbits. In the weeks and months that followed, her case became a national sensation. It caught the attention of the English medical establishment, the king, and the general public. After seven weeks of examination, observation, and reporting, the births were declared false. Charges were brought against Mary Toft for deception, then eventually dropped. But the case hardly ended there. Toft did not fade back into obscurity, because the story had an afterlife in both popular culture and in scholarship. The case of Mary Toft is certainly not unknown. It formed a centerpiece, for example, of Lisa Cody’s masterful account of the intersections between reproductive knowledge, gender, and nationality (Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons, 2008). In Karen Harvey’s hands, Mary Toft’s story provides an opportunity to take a deep dive into a young woman’s reproductive experiences and to reconstruct the political, social, and cultural world of early eighteenth-century England in a way that is accessible to a general audience. The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England is testament to the enduring value of microhistory, to the importance of personal experience in historical narrative, and to the benefits of reading deeply into and against the grain of the archive.
