The Prioress's Tale

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Edward Coley Burne-Jones

"The Prioress's Tale" is one of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.

It follows "

religious life as a means of social advancement, given her aristocratic manners and mispronounced French. She maintains a secular lifestyle, including keeping lap dogs that she privileges over people, a fancy rosary
and a brooch inscribed with Amor vincit omnia ('Love Conquers All').

Her story is of a child

Jews, a common theme in Medieval Christianity, and much later criticism focuses on the tale's antisemitism
.

Plot

The story is introduced with an invocation to the

Jews live in a Christian city. A seven-year-old school-boy, son of a widow, is brought up to revere Mary. He teaches himself to sing the first verse of the popular medieval hymn Alma Redemptoris Mater ("Nurturing Mother of the Redeemer"); although he does not understand the words, an older classmate tells him it is about Mary, the mother of Jesus. He begins to sing it every day as he walks through the local Jewish ghetto
to school.

Requiem Mass until the local abbot asks him how he is able to do so. He replies that although his throat is cut, Mary appeared to him and laid a grain on his tongue, saying he could keep singing until it was removed and she would come for him. The abbot removes the grain and the boy finally becomes silent and dies. The story ends with a reference to Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln
, another child martyr whose death was blamed on Jews.

Genre

The story is an example of a class of stories, popular at the time, known as the "miracles of the Virgin" such as those by Gautier de Coincy. It also blends elements of common story of a pious child killed by the enemies of the faith; the first example of which in English was written about William of Norwich. Matthew Arnold cited a stanza from the tale as the best of Chaucer's poetry.

"My throte is kut unto my nekke boon,"
Seyde this child, "and as by wey of kynde
I sholde have dyed, ye, longe tyme agon.
But Jesu Crist, as ye in bookes fynde,
Wil that his glorie laste and be in mynde,
And for the worship of his Mooder deere
Yet may I synge O Alma loude and cleere.

The Prioress and the Pardoner

In "Chaucer's Prioress and the Sacrifice of Praise", Sherman Hawkins juxtaposes the

martyrdom, shows it as mercy, an effect of grace."[2]

In "Criticism, Anti-Semitism and the Prioress' Tale", L. O. Fradenburg argues for a radical rereading of the binary oppositions between Christian and Jew, Old Law and New Law, literal and spiritual in the tale in part to critique the "patristic exegesis" of Sherman Hawkins' earlier interpretation.[3] Fradenburg challenges Hawkins' "elision of the 'literal' or 'carnal' level of meaning in favour of the spiritual"[4] by lingering on those moments in the tale, such as the "litel clergeon's" transgressive rote memorisation of the Alma Redemptoris, in which this elision fails, or succeeds only ambiguously. She traces the impossibility of ultimately separating and opposing Old and New Laws in the "Prioress' Tale" back to a tension between letter and spirit internal to Paul's discourse itself.[5] Fradenburg gestures at a larger project of turning "patristic exegesis" against itself to read the contradictions revealed by the theological subtext of the tale.

Fradenburg notes that the substance of the "Prioress' Tale" can be linked to the "'child-host' miracle of the later

The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale
" insofar as it is indebted to tales of martyrdom circulated for worldly profit.

See also

References

  1. ^ Sherman Hawkins, "Chaucer's Prioress and the Sacrifice of Praise". JEGP 63 (1964), 623 n.
  2. ^ Hawkins 624.
  3. ^ Louise O. Fradenburg. "Criticism, Anti-Semitism, and the Prioress' Tale". In Valerie Allen and Ares Axiotis (eds.). Chaucer: New Casebooks. St. Martin's Press: New York, 1996, 203.
  4. ^ Fradenburg 203.
  5. ^ Fradenburg 221.
  6. ^ a b Fradenburg 206
  7. ^ A. G. Dickens. The English Reformation. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989, 48.
  8. ^ Fradenburg 207.

Further reading

  • Rose, E. M. (2022) “Prior to the Prioress: Chaucer’s Chorister in its Original Context.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 44, 63-91.

External links

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