Prioress’s Tale, The

   by Geoffrey Chaucer

(ca. 1385)

   One of the more disturbing and controversial of CHAUCER’s CANTERBURY TALES, the tale of the Prioress is a “Miracle of the Virgin” story that, like many such narratives, is full of pathos involving the suffering of an innocent child, and full as well of the virulent anti-Semitism that often characterized Christian attitudes toward Jews in the late Middle Ages, even in places like Chaucer’s England, from which all Jews had been exiled 100 years before (in 1290).

   In the tale a young boy of seven living in a city in Asia is exceptionally devoted to the Virgin, and from an older boy learns by rote the hymn Alma redemptoris mater after discovering that it is a hymn in praise of Mary. The child regularly walks through the Jewish ghetto on his way to school, singing the hymn as he goes. The Jews, enraged by this behavior, hire a thug who cuts the boy’s throat and throws him into a privy. The boy’s distraught mother searches for him anxiously throughout the ghetto, but is unable to find the child until, miraculously, he begins to sing the Alma redemptoris mater from the privy in which he is hidden.The provost of the town is called, and he has those responsible for the murder tortured, drawn, and hanged. The child is brought to the church,where he reveals that, though his throat is cut to his “nekke boon,” he was still able to sing because the Virgin Mary had appeared to him and placed a grain upon his tongue. After the Abbot removes the grain, the child dies and is buried as a holy martyr.

   Some critics have focused on the tale’s expression of “affective piety”—the new highly emotional religiosity that had become widespread in the late 14th century. But the bulk of the criticism has concentrated on the tale’s anti-Semitism. One could argue that Chaucer was simply a man of his time, but in repeating the “blood libel” (the charge that Jews murdered Christian children), he would surely have been aware of papal condemnations of that libel and its promulgation. It could be argued that for the Prioress narrator, who would have never seen a Jew in 14th-century England, Jews existed only as literary “villains” in Marian miracles. Some have argued that Chaucer is emphasizing the shallow intellect of the Prioress by depicting her unthinking cruelty juxtaposed to her unthinking sentimentality. How close the Prioress narrator’s attitude comes to Chaucer’s own, however, remains a difficult question for readers and scholars of Chaucer’s work.

   Bibliography

   ■ Alexander, Philip S. “Madam Eglentyne, Geoffrey Chaucer and the Problem of Medieval Anti-Semitism,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library of Manchester 74 (1992): 109–120.

   ■ Benson, C. David. Chaucer’s Drama of Style: Poetic Variety and Contrast in The Canterbury Tales. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

   ■ Collette, Carolyn P. “Sense and Sensibility in the Prioress’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 15 (1980): 138–150.

   ■ Depres, Denise. “Cultic Anti-Judaism and Chaucer’s Litel Clergeon,” Modern Philology 91 (1994): 413–427.

   ■ Patterson, Lee. “ ‘The Living Witness of Our Redemption’: Martyrdom and Imitation in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (Fall 2001): 507–560.

   ■ Pigg, Daniel F.“Refiguring Martyrdom: Chaucer’s Prioress and Her Tale,” Chaucer Review 29 (1994): 65–73.

   ■ Robertson, Elizabeth. “Aspects of Female Piety in the ‘Prioress’s Tale,’ ” in Chaucer’s Religious Tales, edited by C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990, 146–160.