The Prioress' Tale and Anti-Semitism

“The Prioress’s Tale” and Anti-Semitism
Meg Bernhardt and Rachel Speer
AP English 12
October 30, 2000



One of the more unique and complex tales in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is that of the Prioress. Chaucer the Pilgrim pays great attention to the Prioress’s physical features, clothing and jewelry, and manners in order for Chaucer the Poet to describe her character. The tale she tells offers Chaucer a chance to attack the Prioress, and by extension, the entire Church, for not practicing its own most essential teaching: to love others. He attacks the Prioress in particular for flouting her vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. Most significantly, the Prioress’s tale draws attention to the Medieval Christian treatment of Jews, one of its greatest cases of hypocrisy, which has far-reaching historical bases and future implications.

I. Characterization of the Prioress

The Prioress was a superioress in a medieval convent. Her job was similar to that of a Prior in a monastic community. She was bound to all the restrictions of the nuns, whose lives were dedicated to the cloister; medieval nuns were not dedicated to active service outside the cloister, but were expected to live their entire lives in reverential solitude. The prioress was supposed to practice humility and compassion and follow the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

The outward appearance of the Prioress immediately shows the reader her true inner qualities. Chaucer the Pilgrim looks upon the Prioress with acceptance, but Chaucer the Poet highlights specific aspects of her appearance that bring out her character. The key descriptions of her facial features are, “Her nose was elegant…Her forehead, certainly, was fair of spread.” In the general prologue, Chaucer makes repeated references to the Prioress’s “straining to counterfeit a courtly grace/ A stately bearing fitting to her place/ And to seem dignified in all her dealings.” The detail of her clothing, from her “her veil [which] was gathered in a seemly way” to “Her cloak, [which] I noticed had a graceful charm,” is not fitting for a nun, particularly her wimple, which should have been drawn tightly across her eyebrows, but instead was drawn higher to expose her broad forehead, a sign of high breeding and beauty. She wears jewelry also, “a coral trinket on her arm/ A set of beads, the gaudies tricked in green,/ Whence hung a golden brooch of brightest sheen.” Though a nun was expected to wear a simple rosary for prayer, the other jewelry was unnecessary, and her possession of it betrayed the nun’s vow of poverty.

The brooch in particular clashes with the image a nun should portray, because it holds the inscription Amor vincit omnia, the Latin for “Love conquers all.” If this motto refers to divine love and testified to her religious devotion, she still should not display it on a golden brooch, and the brooch’s motto heightens the irony between the nun’s claim of Christian love and the denial of Christian compassion for the Jews in the tale she tells. If the motto refers to earthly love between a man and a woman, it either casts doubt on the nun’s honesty in keeping the vow of chastity or evinces her envy of women who have not given up their hope for romantic love and motherhood by entering religious life. The ambiguity of the brooch’s message is part of Chaucer the Pilgrim’s way of reporting facts without passing judgment on his fellow travelers.

Chaucer describes the Prioress’ manners as “well taught withal.” She sings mass well and speaks dainty French in the style of English schools, not of French natives. Her pretensions of nobility imply that she cares more about her high reputation among others than about a humble, solitary search for God’s will. During Chaucer’s time, many women of the nobility became nuns, not because they were dedicated to God, but because piety was socially respected, and in times of financial crisis when their families could not supply them with an extravagant dowry, it was the only way for them to continue living an upper class lifestyle.

Another description Chaucer gives of the Prioress is that “she was all sentiment and tender heart.” Her delicacy prevents her from saying any stronger oath than “By St. Loy!” and her sentimental and excruciatingly biased telling of a tale equate her tenderness with weak-minded ignorance of both justice and true compassion. She exhibits motherly instincts in the way she cares for helpless animals and her protectiveness of the boy in her tale. Because she is sworn to chastity as a nun, she should put aside her desire to be a mother, but it is clear that the Prioress reveres and envies motherhood. Her name, “Madam Eglantyne,” is particularly ironic; the eglantine, a flower, was a symbol for the Virgin Mary, who embodied love and mercy, which this Prioress lacks.

Her prologue to her tale contains a quote from Psalm 7 and a long prayer to Mary that are normally recited at the mass for the Feast of the Holy Innocents. The placement of this prayer foreshadows her tale and adds to the portrait of the Prioress’s diligence to act in a manner most seemly to the occasion. The focus of the tale is the Virgin Mary, the divine mother, and her earthly parallel is the mother of the murdered boy. The Prioress feels sympathy for the mother of the boy and admires both Mary and the mother. Her tenderness regarding to the two point to her desire for motherhood.

II. Plot Summary

In a Christian town in Asia, a ghetto served as the home to a Jewish population that hated the Christians. A Christian school stood at one end of the ghetto. One joyful seven-year-old boy, a widow’s son, took a particular interest in praising the Virgin Mary, as his mother had devoutly taught him. When he heard one of his older classmates singing O Alma Redemptoris, a Latin song of praise to Mary, he asked the classmate to teach him the words so that he too could sing it in reverence to the blessed saint. He practiced each day so that he could have the song memorized by Christmas, and sang it on his way to and from school, as he walked through the Jewish ghetto. Satan stirred the hearts of the Jews in hatred for this child’s song, so “all these Jews” conspired and hired a murderer, who grabbed the boy on his way home from school, slit his throat, and “cast him, I say, into a privy-drain, where they were wont to void their excrement.” The mother worried when her son did not return home, and went through the ghetto asking if anyone had seen the boy. All of the Jews denied seeing him, but “Jesus, of His grace,/ Put in her thought…/To come upon that alley…/Where, In a pit, he had been cast aside.” The body began to sing O Alma, attracting all the Christians who were on the streets. They carried the child to the abbey. “The provost then did judgement [sic] on the men who did the murder, and he bid them serve a shameful death in torment there and then on all those guilty Jews; he did not swerve.” The churchpeople started to carry out a funeral service for the child who was still singing, and the abbot inquired of him how he was singing though his throat had been slit. He explained that though he was dead, Jesus desired him to keep singing until his burial in order to glorify Mary. The boy was canonized Saint Hugh of Lincoln.

III. Connections between the Pilgrim and Her Tale

In her account, the Prioress makes two important connections between herself and characters in her tale. She connects herself to the boy by means of color symbolism and devotion to Mary. She also connects herself to the boy’s mother by her attention to the details of motherhood, by creating sympathy for the mother through the use of pathetic language, and by her own protectiveness and motherly praise of the boy. In so doing, she sins twice: by associating herself with the boy, she credits herself with unmerited piety rather than speaking and acting in humility; by associating herself with the mother, she shows her affinity for motherhood, which she should suppress in order to focus on her goal as a nun, to know God.

When lauding the boy’s virtues, the Prioress calls him “this gem of chastity, this emerald/ This jewel of martyrdom and ruby bright.” Chaucer’s description of the nun’s wardrobe includes green beads on her rosary and a coral trinket on her arm. This imagery linking jewels to the boy’s virtues shows the nun’s appreciation for riches (despite her vow of poverty) and further links her to the chastity and martyrdom for which she praises the boy. In her prologue, she praises Mary fervently, as little Hugh did in her story. In her prayer, she says, “For as a child, a twelvemonth old, or less/ That hardly has a word it can express,/Just so am I, and therefore pity me!/ Guide thou the song that I shall sing for thee!” She claims the innocence and untrained but enthusiastic religious devotion of a child, which counter her measured dignity, noble pretensions, and education described in the general prologue. She asks for pity for herself, just as in her tale she evokes pity for the boy.

The prioress also evokes pity for the mother in the story, by always referring to her as “the widow,” and by describing her as a devout woman who “taught her little boy/ To reverence the mother of Christ.” When she searches for her son, the Jews lie to her, which makes her plight even more pitiable because she is a faithful woman who does not deserve to lose her son. The prioress assumes a protective and motherly position toward the boy by mentioning only wonderful things about his character, particularly his chastity and devotion to Mary, and refuses to think that the boy deserves any blame for his own death for having provoked the Jews by singing praises to Mary as he walked through their neighborhood. The prioress’s mothering instincts have already been reported in the general prologue by the way she treats her dogs. In her own prologue she further reveals her obsession with motherhood by mentioning details that are not suitable for nuns to speak of: “for in the mouths of children, such maybe/ As suck the breast, the bounty of Thy ways/ Can be declared in worship and in praise.” As a nun, her attention should be focused on the divinity of Jesus and the holiness of his mother, not on the sensual details of a mother suckling her infant. But this again shows the Prioress’ admiration of motherhood, and shows her empathy for the widow in her tale.

Chaucer has the Prioress tell this tale in order to criticize the blatant hypocrisy most evident in her anti-Semitism. The descriptions of her shallow vanity, representative of the hypocrisy present in the medieval Church, point the reader toward a more subtly drawn but fundamental criticism of her and almost all Christians in medieval England: that they worship a deity who came to Earth to save the Jews, yet they condemn the Jews as outcasts not worthy of the compassion Christ commanded. She portrays all the Jews as sinners who heed Satan’s voice, and does not offer any compassion to them, though she offers plenty to the young boy who provoked them by singing in the ghetto, and to his mother who did not teach him to be smarter than to flaunt his Christianity around the Jews. The very idea that the prioress so honors the Jewish woman Mary for her motherly love of Jesus while so denouncing the Jews as Christ-haters strikes at the heart of the hypocrisy present in medieval Christendom’s hatred of Jews.

Some historians report that our knowledge of Chaucer’s personal beliefs show him to have been a faithful Christian who held particular reverence for Mary. This school of thought asserts that Chaucer used this tale to bring out flaws in the character of the Prioress, but that he harbored the same anti-Judaic views of his contemporaries, and that he took it for granted that the Jews were villains in this story. It holds that to consider the tale an attack on anti-Semitism would be to impose modern ideas on a work that was produced in an historical context that could not have envisioned such a purpose for the work. But most scholars agree that the Prioress’ Tale is too obviously a satire to have been written as an expression of Chaucer’s own beliefs. The prioress makes the comment in reference to the abbot in her tale that he “was a holy man/ As abbots are, or else they ought to be,” by which the nun acknowledges that she harbors doubts about the sincerity of all clergymen. By means of this discrepancy between her claim of innocent, childlike piety and her own awareness of hypocrisy within the church, Chaucer gives the reader an example of the prioress’ way of putting on airs other than her way of “straining to counterfeit a courtly kind of grace,” this one with far more serious implications to her honesty, and by extension, the honesty of all churchpeople.

Despite these serious criticisms of the Prioress and the Church, Chaucer does not portray her as a completely unsympathetic character. Her praise of the Virgin Mary, “O mother-maid, maid-mother, chaste and free!” combined with her emphasis on chastity and motherhood indicate that the Prioress was torn between a reverence for the holiness of chastity and a desire for earthly pleasures of marriage and childbearing. Saint Hugh’s murder is an earthly parallel for Christ’s murder, and the widow is clearly reminiscent of the Virgin Mary. The Prioress’s hatred for Jews can be seen as a release of her spiritual sorrow for Christ’s death as well as a release of her human frustration at not being able to have a child of her own. The widow in her tale loses her son so tragically in order to draw attention to the tragedy of childlessness, for which the nun pities herself and craves pity from others. By becoming wedded to Christ when she entered the convent, she gave up what she appears to desire most, and probably not by choice. Though her hypocrisy cannot be overlooked, the Prioress becomes a sympathetic character because the reader empathizes with the desire for romantic companionship and children.

The reactions of the company of pilgrims does not clarify Chaucer’s judgment of the Prioress. “Now when they heard this miracle every man/ Was sobered.” One can imagine that the other pilgrims respond to the Prioress’s tale with a mixture of awe for Christ’s power and Mary’s holiness, pity for the poor young martyr, and shock at the harsh judgement upon the Jews. But once again, Chaucer the Pilgrim does not elucidate this ambiguity, so we cannot be certain exactly how the various pilgrims responded to the tale. Regardless of how the other characters interpret her tale, Chaucer makes it clear to his readers that the Prioress has sacrificed certain aspects of Christian teaching in order to make her tale more pitiable. The Christians in her tale did not try to convert the Jews, nor did they offer them any opportunity for forgiveness. These actions would have been more in accord with Christ’s instructions to love one’s neighbors, but would have taken the focus away from poor little Hugh’s martyrdom at the hands of the Christ-hating, Satan-serving Jews. The Prioress evokes pity and awe for her tale and consequently for herself rather than selflessly demonstrating Christianity as she pretends to be doing.

The tale of Saint Hugh, called “The Chorister,” was well-known in Chaucer’s time and called, in several forms. An important distinction between Chaucer’s rendition of the tale and another version, from the Vernon Manuscript, does not introduce the Jews initially, but only brings them into the tale when the boy is being slain. The entire Jewish community is not blamed for the murder, as in the Prioress’ account, which is clearly an extreme example of anti-Semitism. According to the Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales:
"The violence of the punishment meted out [in the Prioress’s version of
the tale] to the Jews is unparalleled. In the Vernon version, the murderer is
‘jugget,’ judged, presumably meaning condemned to death; in the Latin
versions preceding Chaucer’s, the worst fate mentioned for the Jews is that
they cannot hear the miraculous song. In the legend as it appears in other
forms, they are occasionally punished but more often converted."


The Prioress’s tale, therefore, is a tale of vengeance against the Jews. The Prioress’s anger toward the Jews shows her protectiveness of the boy whom they murdered, and again relates her to the mother by showing her feeling of personal loss over the boy’s death.

IV. The Medieval Christian view of Judaism and Anti-Semitism

Because the Christian Church held more power than any other authority in medieval Europe, including Britain, those rare citizens who lived outside the church, like Jews, were social outcasts. There were very few Jews in England at this time, so it is unlikely that the characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales would have had any contact with Jews at all. If they had, it probably would have been an unpleasant encounter simply because the Jew would likely have been loaning or collecting money from the Christian. The Prioress’s charge against the Jews that they are “supported by the Crown/ For the foul lucre of their usury” was not unfair; because they were a racial and religious minority, Jews did not have the opportunity to pursue most professions that were controlled by guilds. Money lending, however, carried a social stigma that most Christians avoided, so civil authorities encouraged Jews to enter this occupation since bankers are a necessary component of any society or government.

Christians had biblically-based reasons to hate Jews. They saw Jews as Christ-haters because the Jews insisted that Christ be crucified even when Roman authorities found no reason to kill him. Matthew 27:24-25 reads: “When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.” In the Prioress’s tale, the Jews are repeatedly referred to as the “cursed Jews,” a reminder of the curse they brought upon themselves when they insisted on Christ’s crucifixion. Thus the entire race carried the curse, so that even Jews who converted to Christianity remained suspect.

Medieval anti-Semitism was founded on the beliefs that: the Jewish faith is inferior to Christianity; the Jews, out of malevolence and in alliance with Satan, are trying to overthrow Christian society; and the Church, in order to preserve humanity, has a sacred duty to protect society from the influence of the Jews. The term anti-Semitism was not actually coined until the late nineteenth century, and then emphasized the threat of the Jewish culture to the Germanic culture. This view is clearly a modernization of the medieval view of Jews in society. By the late nineteenth century, religiously-based theories were losing their credence, but using ideas from Social Darwinism gave the Anti-Semites a “modern, intellectually more acceptable way of restating the mediaeval position” (Alexander).


“The Prioress’s Tale,” when viewed within the context of Chaucer’s medieval England, provides a pungent satire on the supposed piety of Christians, especially those most intimately connected with the Church. Aside from the ways in which her tale brings out her hypocritical character, the Prioress’s story highlights the vehement hatred of Jews that Christians possessed though it contradicted the Christian doctrine of loving others. Anti-Jewish sentiment in the Middle Ages undermined, in Chaucer’s view, the honesty of Christianity, and foreshadowed anti-Semitic movements of later centuries. Because of it's ambiguity and several levels of possible interpretation, “The Prioress's Tale” presents a thorough examination of hypocrisy within the medieval church and demonstrates Chaucer's subtlety in satirizing the world in which he lived.



Works Consulted


Alexander, Phillip S. “Madame Eglentyne, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Problem of Medieval Anti-Semitism.” 27 October 2000. http://www.icg.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/sourcebook/alexand.htm

Butler, Urban R. "St. Hugh." Catholic Encyclopedia. 16 October 2000. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07515b.html.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales.

Cooper, Helen. Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

van Court, Elisa Narin. “Socially Marginal, Culturally Central: Representing Jews in Late Medieval English Literature.” 27 October 2000. http://web.english.ufl.edu/exemplaria/preprints/narin.htm

Gardner, John. The Life and Times of Chaucer. New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc. 1999.

Melillo, Elizabeth G., Ph.D. "Chaucer's Prioress." 16 October 2000. http://www.gloriana.nu/prioress.html.

Ott, Michael. "Prioress." Catholic Encylopedia. 16 October 2000. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12428a.html.

"The Prioress' Tale." ClassicNotes. 16 October 2000. http://www.gradesaver.com/ClassicNotes/Titles/canterbury/tale16.html.

Wickham, Victoria. “Chaucer’s Prioress: Simple and Conscientious, or Shallow and Counterfeit?” 27 October 2000. http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/wickham.htm.

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