Mary Toft, Religion and National Memory in Eighteenth-Century England.

In 1726 Mary Toft claimed that she had given birth to rabbits, an event that led to much medical examination and a good deal of satire but surprisingly little religious commentary, apart from William Whiston's interpretation that she was a portent of the apocalypse. And yet Toft was repeatedly remembered and re-invoked throughout the century – along with several other miraculous, supernatural or wondrous events – in relation to broader public discussions about the boundaries between the natural and supernatural, between reason and revelation, with the result that each new ‘remembering’ paradoxically reiterated that those boundaries could not be definitively settled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]