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THE PRIORESS'
TALE OR 'PERFORMING THE PRIORESS'
MICHAEL CALABRESE
The Prioress's Tale poses a very
confusing and uncomfortable set of problems for critics
and for readers. The tale depicts Christian violence
against the Jews in fictive, literary images that are tied
to an actual history of oppression that is well documented
and not in doubt. This history of religious violence has
thus been the focus of much study of the tale, for critics
have tried for years to determine the exact relationship
between the tale and the history of Christian-Jewish
relations that presage the Holocaust. Central to this
issue is the question of agency. Someone, that is, must be
to blame for the hatred depicted in the tale-Chaucer, the
Prioress, the Christian culture that produced them
both-diverse critics say diverse things as they attempt to
determine the causes of that violence and to unravel the
complex web of religious and racial ideology woven (so
uncomfortably) into Chaucer's art.' There is no more
politically charged issue in Chaucer studies.
This essay examines the critical language recent scholars
use to study the tale and explores the professional and
institutional implications of a politically driven
medieval literary criticism. To meet the complex challenge
of the Prioress's Tale, some recent scholars approach it
through a type of criticism that displays a commitment to
"ethics" that seems to take part in a larger critical
quest for what Louise Fradenburg has called "reparation,"
a complicated term that implies that the critic in some
way must address literature's and also criticism's
ideological participation in the injustices of the past. 2
Reading and teaching the Prioress's Tale, therefore, have
become not only literary exercises-comparing analogues,
studying character, tracing patterns of imagery, and so
forth-but also a moral exercise in how we negotiate the
past, heal its wounds, and prepare our own culture's
future. Recent interest in otherness, subalternaity, and
minority culture help animate such an approach to the
tale, for it is clear that a politically conscious
criticism currently dominates our field. 3 Assessing this
aspect of contemporary medievalism, David Lawton, in his
introduction to New Medieval Literatures, praises
a criticism that links past and present and displays an
awareness of ethics:
The scholars I know who do such work and whose work I read
are united in a belief that it is ethical, and may, if we
are effective in communicating its results, be political,
as a positive response to cultural difference in a world
where the fear of it licenses repression and violence.
(Lawton 261)
Lawton here argues that the end of medieval cultural
studies is political in that, if it is well done, it
responds to the contemporary social problems of difference
and violence.
We see what Lawton means in the work of a number of
scholars addressing issues of gender, race, and the
medieval past. Concerning medieval and modern sexualities,
for example, Karma Lochrie implies that our critical
studies can reveal patterns of power and knowledge that
still inform contemporary society: "the medieval
closet-what it kept secret and structured its regimes of
knowledge and ignorance around-has much in common with
contemporary secrecies." "The uses of secrecy," thus "help
us to understand our own personal and public constraints"
(11), and "from the secrets and conversions of the Middle
Ages, the present is challenged to address and possibly
even to reframe its own understanding of its mysteries and
its marvels, its power technologies and its oppressions"
(4). Similarly, Kathleen Biddick hopes to "refigure
politically the borders of the discipline," making it "not
[one] based on expulsion and abjection and bound in rigid
alterity, but one permeable to the risk of futurity" (16).
She does this through a history of the politics of
nineteenthcentury medievalism, a politics she sees fraught
with various forms of "trauma," "melancholy," and
"mourning," revealed in a study of "those excluded on the
exterior of medieval studies in the 19' century" (3), a
history at times wrapped up in the hegemonies of
colonialism and class.4 To enable futurity, the
medievalist must discern and mourn the persistent presence
of the historical traumas of alienation and oppression,
especially when these traumas have in some way enabled the
very history of academic medievalism.
For others, ethical concerns spark not mourning but anger
against those who do not see the historical dangers of
critical complacency. Peter Haidu questions critics who
are not sufficiently sensitive to the ideologies of
violence and the "religious absolutism" behind the Chanson
de Roland and who take refuge, rather, in "cultural
relativism":
There is something profoundly repugnant not only about the
cultural and political ethos displayed by the text ... but
also about the acceptance of an ethos which was
historically so grossly destructive. Such an embrace by
our contemporaries who are-in principle-capable of
conceptually distancing themselves from the position of
the text they are studying is not without serious
ramifications in the twentiethcentury world....
Unfortunately, the same kind of simple "ethical" binarism
that we find in the Chanson de Roland continues to
operate in contemporary scholarship and in modern
political discourse. That dyadism was a necessary
prerequisite for the programmed extermination of the Jews
in the Holocaust, and it was equally present in the
discourse that cast the Soviet Union into the role of the
"evil empire." (37)
As Monika Otter notices, Haidu "barely stops short of
accusing all those who practice [historical relativism] of
personal responsibility for the Holocaust" (Otter, 114).
For all these critics, then, discovery of the Middle Ages
has repercussions for contemporary society because an
understanding of the past will allow us, as Eric Eliason
and I once wrote, perhaps finally to "initiate our own
critical reformations" (Calabrese and Eliason, 275).5
The cultural politicization of medieval studies is clear
from these examples and from the status of such titles as
The Other Middle Ages, The Postcolonial Middle Ages, and
Sex, Dissidents, and Damnation: Minority Groups in the
Middle Ages.6 That is, our collective project is not
only to reveal the meaning and complex beauty of our
literature but also to study the systems of power,
difference, and violence that animate the world that
produced and consumed texts throughout history, a world
full of the neglected and the marginalized. Contemporary
medieval studies, to use Michael Goodich's description of
his own work, seek "to provide a voice to those persons or
groups in medieval society who have often been ignored"
(1). Medieval studies focus not only on the royal and
empowered but also, as Lawton says, on "groups or
activities not privileged by official record-the poor, the
world of work, criminals" (Lawton, 248). Medievalists now
draw the margins to the center, displaying that any
group's power or authority-men, the orthodox,
heterosexuals, a class of privileged critics, and
scholars-comes at another group's expense, for power and
privilege demand exclusion and silencing. The impulse to
address and redress this history is strong; as John Arnold
writes, "there is little more seductive in social history
than the promise of access to the 'voices' of those
normally absent from the historical record" (380).
Medievalists now want to hear the voices of those
excluded, to remember and, if needed, to mourn for them.
The overall instructional effect of critical work that
studies the marginalized, demonized, and oppressed has
been vast and deeply beneficial. Muslim Crusade narratives
and female mystics are in the cannon; we have exposed the
construction and performance of medieval gender. Chaucer
studies have turned with renewed interest to the Eastern
tales and to the ongoing study of women, homosexuality,
and, recently, masculinity. In the new millennium "getting
medieval" means engaging politically with medieval texts
and culture. We now see how vast and demanding are the
peoples, histories, and cultures of this imaginary space,
christened "the Middle Ages" centuries after its end. In
this context, then, I do not mean to turn back the clock
and undo this critical, pedagogical expansion. Nor do I
intend to conduct a blanket attack on the study of
critical ethics in medieval or in literary studies at
large. To do so would be to disregard a vast body of
theory, beginning with Plato's Republic. I want, rather,
to examine critical work that tends particularly to invoke
a strident emotional vocabulary in the pursuit of its
ethical positions and to explore the implications of both
the rhetoric and the politics of this work.
For as scholars and teachers we cannot proceed
uncritically in the pursuit of ethics as an attendant
aspect of our studies of the medieval. The new directions
in our criticism have re-defined the role of the literary
critic in dangerous ways; dangerous in that if critics are
to become ethicists and social theorists, then our
scholarly subject will become undone, and English and
other humanities departments will become subordinated,
ironically, to the corporate university whose goal is to
maintain the very systems of power and authority that we
have sought, with our political criticism, to undermine.
The issue is of such magnitude that it cannot be rehearsed
fully here in one short essay nor by one lone critic. But
I hope that by examining the rhetoric used to study one
poem, the Prioress's Tale, we can explore issues that
reflect a larger problem in Chaucer studies and in
medieval literary studies in general, a problem we have to
address collectively, as a community.
The problem is this: though a politicized criticism
carries the weight and authority of an ethical commitment
and the confidence of ethical certainty, all such
criticism that foregrounds the history of violence and
difference in an attempt to practice critical ethics risks
reducing the text under study to a type of historical hate
crime. Such literary criticism is, further, very difficult
to critique because it shields itself in ethical surety,
in the language of tolerance and social justice. When a
critic performs ethics, who would dare oppose? Because our
historical judgments about ethics tend to be more absolute
and unanimous-the Holocaust was evil-a criticism that
employs moral outrage as a strategy to prove its critical
thesis is potentially totalizing, prejudicial, and
absolute. And in questioning such criticism one risks
being accused of taking an inexcusably apolitical position
or, worse, of being insensitive to the history of violence
and difference, as is made clear by Haidu's attack on
cultural relativists who fail to confront the repugnant
ideologies of Roland.
It has become a chestnut that all readings are political
and that we cannot escape some sort of historical filters
that will inform our literary analysis. Therefore, I do
not intend to "do an apolitical reading" of the Prioress's
Tale or to claim that I can or that anyone should
de-historicize themselves and read out of time by focusing
only on art instead of the politics of religious violence.
Nor do I claim any ethical superiority for my comments
here, for it is not more ethical to eschew critical ethics
rather than to assert them. My claim, rather, is that
foregrounding ethics at all is dangerous because criticism
does not meet the basic criterion for ethics.
Literary criticism does not solve political problems. My
intention is therefore hortatory. I advise that we closely
watch the effects of a political criticism that may
satisfy an urge to righteousness but that may also
fundamentally and dangerously re-define our profession at
one of the most crucial times in its history. For though
the ethical imperative appears to create a socially
engaged and thus socially responsible criticism, we must
be aware of how such a critical disposition, though
seemingly radical, may be all too comfortably commodified
and assimilated into institutional academic culture of the
twenty-first century, which moves ever closer to corporate
models of utility cloaked in sensitivity, tolerance, and
new general education diversity requirements. We may find
ourselves, then, only "performing" ethics, satisfying
career and institutional imperatives but thus conducting a
far less radical critical movement than we had thought.
This assimilation has been noted before. Bill Readings
observes how, oddly, "the success of a left-wing criticism
.... is turning out to fit so well with institutional
protocols, be it in the classroom or in the career
profile" (13). Readings seeks to "question... from a
sympathetic point of view, the unqualified acceptance both
of interdisciplinary activity and of Cultural Studies that
has been fairly common among academic radicals" (39). The
tendencies visible in the following credo from my own
university's new catalogue copy bespeak a national
problem:
Students will be required to complete two courses
certified as diversity courses... It is the intent of the
diversity requirement to promote understanding of
diversity and encourage tolerance and acceptance of
others. Therefore, students should be encouraged ... to
take courses reflecting the life experiences of people
with whom they are less familiar... diversity courses
should deal with both theoretical and practical issues of
race, ethnicity, gender, and class... provid[ing] for a
consideration of special needs, sexual orientation,
language, religion, and age when appropriate. [As an
outcome] students will be provided with the tools to
explore their own culturally based beliefs and develop
tools to change those beliefs which lend themselves to
prejudice. (12)7
This requirement puts much pressure on Chaucer, on the
Song of Roland, and on all of our poems and those who
study and teach them. The project is one of social
engineering through sensitivity training. Literary and
intellectual concerns per se are irrelevant, for the
courses are "expect[ed] to have a primary focus on
diversity," "go[ing] beyond the normal inclusion or
perspectives from different groups that is a basic part or
responsible scholarship and sound pedagogy in almost all
courses" (3). Corporate workplace management overrides
academics. It is frightening to think but easy to see how
an ethically driven medievalism might fit into the
curriculum mandated by this document, itself a mixture of
corporatese and edu-speak. Masao Miyoshi, in an article
critical of "gesture[s] of pedagogic expediency," points
to the potential ironies arising from scholars'
participation in this kind of curricular politics: "to the
extent that cultural studies and multiculturalism provide
students and scholars with an alibi for their complicity
in the TNC [transnational corporation] version of
neocolonialism, they are serving, once again, just as one
more device to conceal liberal self-deception" (cited in
Readings, 203 n.3).8 "Self deception" describes a worst
case scenario, but this much is clear: In this complex,
volatile context of edu-business, medievalists must
monitor their ethical projects in relation to the evolving
curricular imperatives that are redefining the
university's relationship to twenty-first-century
culture.9 As we negotiate this relationship we should
consider, ultimately, an Arnoldian disinterestedness from
contemporary issues of race, class, and gender for fear
that if we too closely link the medieval and the modern in
relation to these politics, we will be packaging our
profession for the architects of the corporate university
who will have figured out, finally, what it is that "we
do" and will blithely assimilate it to the university of
excellence, an institution interested in producing
students just politically sensitive enough to facilitate
the smooth operation of global capitalism as it forges its
"solutions for a small planet.""
The Prioress's Tale is an important locus in which to
consider these issues because the critical tendencies I
trace above are evident in recent work done on the tale.
But how could we possibly take a "disinterested" approach
to such a poem, especially in post-Holocaust culture? One
potential way to de-center violence and racial politics
may be to recognize that the doctrines held by the
characters in the Prioress's Tale-so absolute and evil-are
not interchangeable with the tale. That is, we should not
confuse history and poetry. There is no evidence that the
tale participated in or incited anti-Judaic attitudes or
actions in Chaucer's England." In fact, Mary Godfrey has
compiled evidence about the early manuscript history of
the tale indicating that in terms of racial politics it
was a rather impotent document, appearing mainly in
religious anthologies, often with its "pathos and
anti-Semitism ... altered, excised or otherwise ignored"
(94). Manuscript Harley 2251, adds Godfrey, even omits the
invocation of Hugh of Lincoln, having the "immediate
narrative effect" of "diminish[ing] the accusation of Jews
as murderers of Christian children" (101). And even though
the tale "enjoyed a remarkable degree of popularity
throughout the fifteenth century," the lack of interest in
the Jews in the tale suggests, as Godfrey sees it, "that
anti-Semitism no longer represented, at least for this
small group of readers and owners, a viable reality"
(108). However we react to this last statement, it is
probably fair to say that the Prioress's Tale is not Piers
Plowman. No one was ever found with inflammatory verses
from Madame Eglantine on his person while committing an
act of racial violence, as a rebel, about to be hanged,
concealed a letter of John Ball, laced with images from
Langland's great poem.12
Thus, though we can generalize that the Prioress's
Tale is part of a body of what we now know of as
anti-Judaic literature, it is not an event in the history
of hatred and violence any more than it is an event in the
history of Mary's miracles; it is a representation of
these things." Chaucer's composition of the tale is indeed
an historical action-but not an event of the same kind as
documented violence against the medieval Jews. Chaucer,
unlike Matthew Paris or the authors of the Burton and
Waverley annals, which relate the story of Hugh of
Lincoln, does not chronicle historical incidents but makes
a poem by creating a character who, in turn, creates
characters who play out an almost allegorical drama of
religious combat. 14 In this context, the Jews of the
Prioress's Tale are not much different from the Muslims of
the Man of Law's Tale, or, for that matter, the
Athenians of the Knight's Tale, for each
represents a certain non-Christian limitation or error.
These depictions and the multivocality behind them are the
historical events, rather than the violence itself. What
this event, the tale, means is never as clear as the
actual instances of religious violence throughout the
Middle Ages. Poetry cannot be reduced to social history.
Put another way, Chaucer says nothing about the Jews in
the Prioress's Tale. Unlike a chronicle, papal
bull, sermon, or scholastic dialogue, the tale contains no
information. The new historicist and the ethicist,
propelled by the belief that literature does not have its
own properties but "those of discourse itself," are too
tempted to see art as a symptom of history and to
substitute historical and ethical concerns for
literary-critical ones."
The conflict between poetry and history is not new.
Sidney, in his famous Defense, tells us that the
poet never lies because he never "affirms." The poet
consciously invents, aware that we will not believe in the
veracity of his representation but in the truth of human
experience captured by the fancy of his erected wit. We
should, therefore, neither compel the poet to affirm nor
be so eager to indict the poetry as complicit in
historical ideologies that we now find abhorrent.16
To demonize art shifts the critic's project from literary
to ethical while raising ethics to a high status, as if it
were the fulfillment, the final evolution in critical
history, the foundation upon which we build Biddick's
"futurity" and ensure against the repetition of the
"dyadism" and "religious absolutism" that, as Haidu sees
it, allowed the Holocaust. One might notice that ethics
now holds the status theology had among the seven medieval
liberal arts, just as all other disciplines served
theology, so now philology, close reading, historicism,
and interdisciplinary studies must serve ethics. Another
analogue for such a system is Augustine's principle of caritas,
expounded in the De Doctrina, which governs the
justness of every act of Biblical interpretation. In this
sense then, ethics may be becoming our own mark of a
valid, just, and even moral reading.
I argue therefore that instead of continuing to read the Prioress's
Tale until we produce a flood of readings that
support an ethical understanding of the history of
violence and difference, we should de-center such history
and re-contextualize the Prioress, in both teaching and
scholarship, into the literary world of the Canterbury
Tales, back into the sea of ambiguity and irony,
focusing not only on racial history but also on character
study, imagery, sources and analogues, the visual
tradition, and female voicing. This may seem self-evident
and part of any worthwhile study of any tale, but what is
most important is that as a critical community we allow
that these pursuits are not necessarily tied to political
engagement with the tale and allow that we can pursue them
without feeling that we are neglecting a higher
responsibility to ethics.
I do not, however, advocate de-historicizing the tale and
ignoring the issue of religious violence. Doubtlessly the
Prioress's story of affective piety and of violence as
religion, no less than her fetishization of manners over
substance, her emotional delicacy, and her
superciliousness, have a prominent place in our critical
understanding of Chaucer's art. The Prioress cannot mean;
she can only feel, and she feels all the wrong things.
Chaucer satirizes a life, a vocation, and a narratology
based on the affective and the affected "conscience," set
in the empty, "tendre herte." But to enact a study of this
very artificial Prioress, we first must subordinate the
issues of blame and reparation and must resist the
temptation to use history and ethics to craft our
political, critical performances. For when we do not
resist, we risk conducting, ironically, an affective
criticism that employs the same, potentially sterile,
emotionalism that we indict in the Prioress herself.
Prioress studies often focus on the issue of anti-Judaism,
for the "little clergeoun's" murder, though studied
thematically and imagistically, is not itself a political
issue because it depicts an imagined crime - the legend
that the Jews killed young Hugh of Lincoln is roundly
discredited - while the killing of the Jews has analogues
in real history. A number of general theories and
variations guide, in one way or another, almost all the
inquiries: Chaucer is anti-Semitic and we have to live
with it; Chaucer's culture is anti-Semitic and thus he is
too by inclusion; Chaucer's culture was not wholly
anti-Semitic, and Chaucer satirizes those who were by
creating insipid anti-Semites; the Prioress, not her
maker, therefore is anti-Semitic, and Chaucer was a
sensitive, tolerant man, ahead of his time and thus
welcomed in our own."
Often not only the focus and framework of the arguments
but also the rhetoric of Prioress studies are informed by
political imperatives, encouraging a strong emotional
reaction rather than thoughtful review from their readers.
Critics introduce their arguments by describing the
Prioress's "unmistakable hatred of Jews" (Koretsky, 10),
and they warn against this "dangerously effective
anti-Semitic tale" (litter, 282), arguing that the tale
"may fairly be described as anti-Semitic tract," perhaps
the "best anti-Semitic tract ever written" (Alexander,
119-20). Contemporary terms like "Holocaust" (Alexander,
109), "persecution literature" (Despres, 415),
"anti-Semitism" (Alexander, 109; Archer, 46; Koretsky,
10), and even "Auschwitz" (Holsinger, 158) appear
repeatedly." If critics invoke this vocabulary and demand
that the Prioress's Tale be interpreted and taught
with an "explicitly moral approach" (litter, 282), then a
critic who neglects this issue might well be accused of a
lack of ethical integrity. As Alexander puts it, for
critics to examine the tale and to ignore the question of
anti-Semitism would "strike most educated people as
displaying a detachment from life bordering on the
irresponsible, if not on the perverse" (109). Scholars
feel the pressure, and a passing denunciation of the
tale's "intolerance, bigotry ... hatred," and "enduring
cultural stereotypes" may not be enough.19
These formulations concerning the meaning and the teaching
of the tale share one goal: to get us closer to the hate
in the heart of an imaginary character, a hate all the
more pernicious coming from a falsely pious cleric, a
"seemingly gentle nun preaching hatred" (Koretsky, 23) who
is, further, "not developed morally" (Zitter, 279). This
language tends to isolate the hatred of the Prioress as an
end in itself, but an end linked to an ethical, critical
project. "The modern critic must have the right," as
Koretsky explains, "to consider the moral meaning of the
Prioress's apparent relish in recounting the Jews'
'shameful deeth"' (Koretsky, 22). The critic's
relationship to morality is unclear in this statement, but
Koretsky clarifies what he means. The fault must lie
somewhere and "exculpation of the Prioress's anti-Semitism
on the grounds of literary convention is unacceptable"
(Koretsky, 18). Nor, according to Koretsky, is her
innocence about the dangers of inherited stereotypes any
grounds for exoneration. He goes on the explain the
dangers of simply attributing the hatred to innocence or
to the conventional:
To some this might well be an adequate explanation and
exculpation of the Prioress's anti-Semitism: it is not to
be taken seriously because Jews are not "real" to her. But
there is another interpretation. The trouble with the
Prioress's conception of the Jews ... is precisely that it
ignores historical reality. As long as wicked Jews live
exclusively in a childish imagination, and there is no
actual contact with real Jews, the practical harm may be
minimal, whatever the injury to truth, whatever the moral
culpability. But when carriers of such childish
distortions meet real Jews (or Blacks, or professors, or
business tycoons, or any other stereotypes) for the first
time in the flesh, how do they react? (23)
Though Koretsky rejects any reading of the tale that would
"forfeit the intriguing ambiguity in the personality of
the teller" (22) and argues that the tale "must be seen in
its dramatic context" (21), his vocabulary betrays a
fixation on the extra-literary issues of racial hatred,
moral responsibility, and personal culpability, which he
doggedly pursues: "though antiSemitism may be a common
element in the miracle of the Virgin, it is hardly a
necessary one. The presence of anti-Judaism in the
Prioress's Tale, it follows, represents a choice, if not
on the Prioress's part, then on Chaucer's" (19). His final
questions, further, about hypothetical responses to
ahistorical situations of stereotyping yield no helpful
answers.
Just as some critics explore the Prioress's guilt, others
explore Chaucer's own. Many explain that Chaucer was a
product of his time and exhibited the prejudices of
fourteenth-century English society. As Alexander contends,
he must be held "responsible for his creatures," and he
"cannot be allowed carte blanche to publicize any point of
view purely and simply on the grounds that there are
people who say such things" (Alexander, 117). Chaucer, we
are told, should realize that "diatribes against the Jews
(or against anybody) make for bad art" (Archer, 46). As a
maker of "bad art," Chaucer thus must be a bad artist, a
poet guilty of glorifying the brutal destruction of the
historically persecuted Jews.
What sparks this vocabulary is the urge to conflate the
Holocaust with medieval treatment of the Jews, based in
part on a perceived continuity from the Hugh of Lincoln
affair to the twentieth century. In a broad coda the most
learned history of the fourteenth-century ecclesiastical
politics that inspired the cult of Hugh of Lincoln sees
the story, sparked by the instigation and investigation of
John de Lexinton, as a "strand in English Literature and a
support for irrational beliefs about Jews from 1255 to
Auschwitz" (Langmuir, 1972, p. 482).20 Such a perspective
fails to distinguish between historical and emotional
detail, and when we apply this statement to the Prioress's
Tale, we tie to Chaucer the heavy stone of Nazism,
summarily ending all reflection and debate. But ethical
criticism is not afraid to link the historical and the
emotional and, further, to tie them both to morality. We
see this in Haidu's defense of Lee Patterson's reference
to Primo Levi in Chaucer and the Subject of History.
Haidu here underlines the importance of the Holocaust to
medieval studies:
The reference to the Holocaust and its issues is a
necessary one for any thoughtful medievalism. It can
inscribe the historicity of the medieval text and that of
the monstrous critic, and a critical imperative which is,
if anything, moral. It is the negative imperative of
avoiding even symbolic repetitions of the Holocaust. It
prohibits, for instance, the sympathetic representation of
medieval prefigurations of the Holocaust, such as the
imperialistic and colonizing adventurism of the Crusades,
with their frequent degenerations into genocidal rampages
against Muslims, Jews, and even merely foreign Christians.
(Haidu, 1995, p. 59)
The Holocaust, then, prevents critics from re-committing,
albeit symbolically, the Holocaust itself by failing to
condemn the agents of its prefigurations. The scholar is
licensed to conflate past and present in order to monitor
the morality both of his subject and of his analysis. "Any
thoughtful medievalism," for Haidu must establish and
police this complex nexus of history, emotion, criticism,
and morality. The Holocaust thus not only haunts any
reading of the Prioress's Tale but also establishes the
emotional and moral framework in which it is to be
understood.
Oddly, the Prioress herself displays a similar urge to
conflate history and spark feeling in a reference she
makes at the end of her tale, establishing for the hearer
the exact relationship, as she sees it, among history,
emotion, morality, and poetry:
O
yonge Hugh of Lyncoln, slayn also
With
cursed Jewes, as it is notable,
For
it is but a litel while ago,
Preye
eek for us, we synful folk unstable,
On us
his grete mercy multiplie,
For
reverence of his mooder Marie. Amen. (VII 684-90)
The Prioress controls history by turning 150 years into
"a litel while ago," sacrificing temporality for an
emotional effect by bringing the horror closer." The
murder becomes a timeless event that both reinforces our
feelings of sorrow and hatred, and provides the hope of
our own miraculous salvation. The emotional and moral
implications here are clear: anyone who cannot make this
leap and who fails to feel the immediacy of Hugh's death
symbolically recreates and participates in his murder,
becoming one of the cursed, criminal Jews who merit no
mercy; mercy will, however, be "multiplied" by the
intercession of the dead boy himself for those "sinful
folk" who can feel the power of the Prioress's affective
artistry and just as affective historiography. Poetry,
as the Prioress employs it, serves both emotional and
moral ends: we hear, we feel, we mourn, and we reform.
When critics view the Prioress, her tale, and Chaucer
solely in terms of an anti-Semitism, "both frightening
and repugnant" (Zitter, 282), they tinge their rhetoric
with the very emotionalism that charms but also affronts
us in the Prioress herself. For critics have often
rightly noted her overwhelming feeling, describing the
"tenderness of the opening lines of the Prologue, and
the careful building up of pathos and emotion" (277).
Chaucer has prepared us for her style by depicting her
pure but perverse feelings in her portrait:
But for to speken of hire conscience,
She was so charitable and so pitons
She wolde wepe, if that she saugh a mous
Kaught in a trappe, if it were deed or bledde.
Of smale houndes hadde she that she fedde
With rosted flessh, or milk and wastel-breed.
But score wepte she if con of hem were deed,
Or if men smoot it with a yerde smerte;
And al was conscience and tendre herte. (I 142-50)
This "conscience" and "tendre herte" produces a
merciless pathos, at the center of which is the
unrelenting image of an anxious widow, "with face pale
of drede" (VII 589), searching for a child whom we know
is slaughtered:
This poure wydwe awaiteth al that nyght
After hir litel child, but he cam noght; ...
With moodres pitee in hir brest enclosed,
She Booth, as she were half out of hir mynde,
To every place where she hath supposed
By liklihede hir litel child to fynde;
And evere on Cristes mooder meeke and kynde
She cride, and atte laste thus she wroghte:
Among the cursed Jues she hym soghte ...
She frayneth and she preyeth pitously
To every Jew that dwelte in thilke place,
To telle hire if hir child wente oght forby.
(VII 586-87, 593-602)
Such pathos produces a tale that silences and stuns her
compagnie: "Whan seyd was al this miracle, every man /
As sobre was that wonder was to se" (VII 691-92). When
critics perform an affective and moral analysis, we too
are struck mute: no response is needed or even possible.
We are afraid to disagree.
An alternate but related tendency is displayed by
critics who do not reduce the poem to discourse or to
history in order to conduct a moral analysis but who
reveal the poetry itself as complicit in the ideology of
hatred and difference. These critics do not separate
aesthetics from morality but rather inspect and
demystify the poesis. In a dramatically bracing article
that has essentially enabled contemporary study of the
tale and its complex cultural politics, Louise
Fradenburg argues that, "few aspects of the Prioress's
Tale have been so consistently mishandled... as
its artistry" (96), an artistry that she finds powerful
but ultimately to be nothing but "empty formality...
which actually-if one reads carefully and is not
mesmerized-says very little" (1989, pp. 97, 95).11 Such
deceptive emptiness powerfully embodies the tale's
themes of exclusion and persecution, because for
Fradenburg the Prioress's poetic of stillness, muteness,
childhood, transcendence, and changelessness is an
anti-narrative, anticreative force, ultimately the enemy
of "difference," which is represented by the Jew, the
abject entity that Christianity needs in order to
sustain its own purity and immutability. Fradenburg uses
the tale as an allegory of its own critical history.
Thus critics, who like the pilgrim audience, display a
silent gravity in response to the tale, that is, who
remain silent on its ideologies and fail to unmake its
poetics, tacitly participate in its poetics of
difference, reflecting our culture's "fears of its own
capacity for vulnerability to change and creativity"
(108). The Prioress, in her attempt to preserve the
changeless, seems to represent in this scenario a
Chaucerian critical establishment resistant to "the
emergence of new modes of critical practice" (72). In
opposition comes "'criticism' or the movements of
difference-generational, gendered, ethnic" which "must
displace the silent sobriety of the pilgrims' response
to the Prioress's Tale" because it allows us to recover
for ourselves the "power to imagine and make new" (108).
A theoretical criticism thus defeats the enemy, the
immutability that fosters exclusion and violence.
Indeed, Fradenburg ends her essay with Horkheimer and
Adorno's axiom that "true madness" lies in immutability
(1989, p. 108). However, Lawrence Besserman posits the
anachronism of the claim: "Horkheimer and Adorno may
have felt that `True madness lies ... in immutability,'
but it's doubtful that Chaucer did." The anachronism can
be taken further, for to indict changelessness and
immutability is to deny the poem's culture its poetics
of hope, reducing it merely to a vehicle for the
ideologies of racial hatred and, finally, to an allegory
for a criticism that fears the radical politics of the
movements of difference.
One final aspect of Fradenburg's argument points to the
problems at hand. She implies that we cannot understand
the tale unless we "lend an ear" (78 and 82) to a Jewish
medieval text that depicts the sufferings and
lamentations felt by a family surviving the dislocation
and slaughter, the twelfth-century Book of
Remembrance of Rabbi Ephraim of Bonn. She then
studies this text for its fine feeling and beauty of
expression of sadness and loss. It is an interesting
analogue to Chaucer's text; comparing its voice to the
Prioress's enables Fradenburg, as Sheila Delany writes,
"to make an eloquent point about the Jews own voicing of
loss and pain." "But," Delany continues, the comparison
to the twelfth-century text "is of little help in
contextualizing a late fourteenth-century English
representation" (201). 1 want to problematize the
comparison further. Explaining the nature of her inquiry
into the past, Fradenburg argues, through Elaine Scarry,
that it is the critic's particular responsibility to
"restore the voice" and bestow "visibility" on pain and
suffering so as to "help the sufferer once again to
become available to others through verbal and material
artifacts." This act has important political
implications:
Let us not be confused about the nature of this
responsibility: when, as critics, we attempt the
compassion of "putting sentience into speech," we are
not therefore sacrificing truth to our values or our
political commitments. We are, instead, refusing an
untruth-that untruth which derealizes, which unmakes the
voice, which both brings about and conceals the breaking
down of language by pain. It is crucial, then, that we
understand that too much scholarship on the Prioress's
Tale has participated in the unmaking of the voice of
the Jew. (1989, p. 82).
In a gentler version of Peter Haidu's claims, Fradenburg
here links critics who neglect the racial politics of
the tale to a compassionless crime against a people:
such a critic "has participated in the unmaking of the
voice of the Jew." Thus, ironically, when it seems that
"movements of difference" are waking us from the silent
sobriety that the Prioress casts upon us, that same
movement strikes us mute once again, convinced that
prior studies of the tale take part, however
unintentionally, in a reactionary racial politics. Thus,
though we are promised freedom from "totalization" of
the Middle Ages which errs, as Fradenburg elsewhere
argues, in "preserving the past for the few who know how
properly to revere it" by excluding other interpretive
communities (see Fradenburg, 1990, 172 ff.), we are
nonetheless in danger of a new totalization, preserving
the past for the those who can "construct a medievalism
that is politically compassionate" (Fradenburg, 1990, p.
193). Again we see the primacy of the affective, while
we wonder who will oversee this new construction and
what new exclusions it might bring.
What seems apparent from this survey of critical
politics and rhetoric, then, is that critics have been
struggling to distill the perfect statement of
indignation over the tale's anti-Judaic violence. Part
of the motivation behind this critical competition is,
as we have seen, a sense that this tale, more than any
other piece in our medieval canon, is directly linked to
the Holocaust. The history of medieval Christian-Jewish
relations is by no means a simple history, and thus to
evoke the emotional power of the Holocaust and use terms
like "Auschwitz" is affective and emotional, terminating
all discussion. Andrew Gow warns against such
conflations, observing that in modern anti-Semitism,
"Christians still believed that Jews were hostile to
them and their religion, but the reasons imagined and
cited for the hostility would change radically before
hatred gave way to horror" (Gow, 720).24 David
Nirenberg's work is central here. Arguing that we should
focus on "local contexts" for violence rather than
"according to a teleology leading, more or less
explicitly, to the Holocaust" (4-5), he exhorts us to be
"more critical than we have previously been about
attempts to link medieval and modern mentalities,
medieval ritual murder accusations and modern genocide"
(7).25Further, as Spector shows in relation to Chaucer,
tracing the Prioress's ideology does not necessarily get
us closer to an historical understanding of
Christian-Jewish relations in the Middle Ages, for "the
historical position and experience of the Jews were far
more complex than the simple assumptions of the
Prioress's Tale and its literary and theological matrix
suggest" (Spector, 228).
Developing this caution, Elisa Narin van Court notes the
"resistance among literary scholars to acknowledge that
medieval Christian response to Jews and Judaism
transcends the convenient rubric of a univocal and
monolithic anti-Judaism" (293). She cautions against
reducing a "variable set of attitudes... to a
phrase-anti-Judaism-which in turn is accepted as
unfortunate but inevitable, and therefore, not
particularly interesting" (298). Narin van Court reports
that she has been warned that in taking her position she
is "walking down the path of Holocaust revisionism" (298
n.13)-an accusation that actually proves her point about
the appeal of a knowable and monolithic racial politics,
a politics that it is tempting to police. Oddly, we see
proof of what Narin van Court studies even in the very
story of the murder of young Hugh of Lincoln, a kind of
ground zero for the anti-Judaism of the Prioress. As he
describes the seizure of the accused, the Burton
Chronicler makes a point of distinguishing between
cursed and Scriptural Jews:
Nam cum ex decreto regio ballivis et
aliis exeuntibus ut Judaeos ca
perent,
scelus sceleri accumulantes, (non a Juda Jacob filio,
nec Juda
Macabaeo
Matathiae filio, sed a Juda proditore perfido
perditionis
filio,
affectu et opere trahentes nomina). (Luard, 344) 26
The Jews get their name not from Judas the ancestor of
Christ himself and not from the great Biblical warrior
who defeated God's enemies, but from the foul traitor
who betrayed Christ. Even in the very nest of
anti-Judaism, the English author preserves the integrity
of historical, Scriptural Jews that his audience would
admire and revere for their role in Christian sacred
history. Like Narin van Court, Sylvia Tomasch draws
attention away from "the almost exclusive critical
attention paid to the Prioress's Tale" in Chaucer
studies to other English works that "foster the creation
of virtuality and the paradox of Jewish absent presence"
after the expulsion (see 243-45), for, though absent,
the Jew was central "to the construction of Englishness
itself" (244).27 In relation to study of the Prioress,
then, this very recent work on Jews in Chaucer's age
indicates that when we fix upon and police an overt or
monolithic racial politics, we risk turning the tale
into a deceptive synecdoche of medieval Christendom's
relation to the Jews, which is never without its
ambivalences.28
A politically engaged criticism, such as the kind we
have been analyzing concerning Chaucer's Prioress's
Tale, has to understand the cultural implications of its
work and to be wary of unintended effects. To study
hatreds, violences, and injustices with the announced
purpose of creating a "positive response" to a world
that licenses "repression and violence" is to conduct a
politics of affect, dangerous not so much in its
utopianism as in its re-definition of literary studies,
a redefinition that the corporate university of the
twenty-first century, operating like a state-run HMO,
will happily assimilate into its own economic and social
ends. A humanities that displays civic utility is, as
Plato remarked long ago, good for the state. Yet where
many critics today see Plato to be a utopian and even
(as Bertrand Russell saw him) a fascist, these same
critics do not see the dangers to academic freedom that
political criticism can spawn.
One useful way of de-centering hatred and politics is to
consider the Prioress more fully in the context of the
poem from which she comes. Perhaps in this way we can
restore to our literary criticism the sense of
"particularities" that Nirenberg calls for in historical
study.29 The Canterbury Tales is in part about ways of
imagining the power of God and his agency in human
lives. The Knight explores the concentric circles of
human and divine power, searching for the truth of
control and destiny in the "Firste Moevere." The Miller
parodically re-imagines divine guidance, enlisted in the
service of a lusty clerk. The Man of Law gives us a
rough and ready god of romance, steady at the tiller of
his allegorical heroine's wandering bark. The list could
continue. The Prioress, for her part, continues the
attempts to capture God's agency, depicting Him through
Mary in battle with Satan. It is yet another genre,
another voice that purports to locate God and explain
his mystery and mercy. But like all Chaucerian
narratives, it is compromised by the affect and
affectation of the teller. As Langland does, so Chaucer
offers a series of speakers who seem to have answers but
really do little more than try our patience until the
next witness appears. All authorities are compromised,
leaving Will stupefied or wandering like an idiot-or
just plain tired.
So too is the Prioress a compromised authority, and thus
Chaucer in the Prioress's Tale satirizes a narratology,
an ideology, and a doctrine of social reformation based
solely on the affective. Fradenburg (who is most
effective in this context) and Despres, both working
from Mary Douglas's model, tellingly connect the
Prioress's sense of spiritual perfection with a
society's need to purge and cleanse itself, particularly
with reference to the Lateran Council's institution of
yearly penance as preparation for receiving communion.
Despres writes that the Jews, "despite their expulsion
from England, remained essential to symbolic patterns
which defined the very essence of community for medieval
Christians" (Despres, 417).30 The Canterbury Tales is
obviously about renewal and purgation, for pilgrimage
and penance frame the work, however invisible or
distorted they may become in between: in Melibee, we
witness how the sentence of Prudence heals us; oddly so
can the twisted preaching of the Pardoner, the social
competition that produces gentilesse in the Franklin,
the magically induced reformation of man in the Wife of
Bath's Tale, and the Parson's grinding, last-ditch
attempt at cold doctrine. The Prioress too calls for
renewal, for the shutting out of the abject, the Jew,
through pure emotion. That is why Chaucer perfects the
genre of the Marian miracle (a perusal of Beverly Boyd's
collection reveals how dreadful the fruits of the genre
can be), conjoining it to the legends of Hugh of
Lincoln, pulling out all the stops, experimenting with
voice, exploring what affect can do at its best in a
deluxe version of the popular genre, bolstered with the
emotion of grizzly local legend.
The best literary criticism is one that can acknowledge
these fictive contexts in proportion to the historical
and cultural, not apoliticizing the tale but at least
depoliticizing the "critical move," lest ethics and
compassion become the new transcendental telos of our
work.31 Perhaps to expect escape from it is chimerical.
But what we can do is to continue the evolving process
of introspection that Howard Bloch recognized
medievalism performing ten years ago: "becoming
conscious of its own critical moves" and studying the
"implication of the self in the critical act" (Bloch,
205). Such awareness is ever more important, and just as
we inspect historical discourses, we must continually
inspect the discourse of our own power and authority,
wary of its increasingly corporate academic
implications. We need to forge an academic culture that
is more open, where dialogue and dissent are permitted
and not foreclosed by the very choice of topics such as
rape, trauma, genocide, and racism. When these highly
emotional topics are raised in the context of a critic's
ethics, rational discourse becomes impossible. Only when
we are free to talk openly about them, without fear of
exclusion, and are free to conduct a metacriticism,
regardless of topic and in spite of emotionalism, are we
ever likely to advance a critical dialogue in medieval
literary studies. Doing this in part answers Bloch's
call for "an external history of the discipline of
medieval studies, one that would contextualize the many
hidden elements and motivations of the endeavor in which
we are engaged" (218-19).
Bloch continues that some of these elements "are either
ignored or, according to the strictures of our
interpretive community, are the subject of taboo" (219).
In this context, then, I hope that the current essay
will bring about further debate and critique and
continue the process of understanding the intended
politics and also the political uses of our critical
performances. The danger is that these two politics may
not be the same, for the former may be assimilated into
the latter by an institutional industry with its own
agenda, which may include its own commodified version of
the "compassionate politics" that Fradenburg calls for
and the "politically radical Chaucer" that a new
generation of critics is unafraid to imagine (see
Fradenburg, 1990, p. 193; 1989, pp. 74, 108). Ultimately
we may not be able to control such assimilation, as
deans, provosts, presidents, and chancellors continue to
oversee the drafting of diversity requirements and
mission statements about tolerance and multiculturalism.
But since we have been sensitized to beware of "powerful
elites" (see Fradenburg, 1989, p. 75) who control
discourses of power, if we are to monitor our role in
the academy, we must study the processes by which we too
become powerful, ever vigilant of the role that that
power has at higher institutional registers, where it
can become a commodity and thus spite us. Biddick
asserts that her "immediate concern" in studying
nineteenth-century foundations of medievalism is to
establish "what kind of academic behavior gets rewarded"
and to "show how academic prestige is produced and
consumed" (8). If it is worthwhile to conduct this
analysis of academic power in the past, it is certainly
worthwhile to try to conduct it in the present as well.
Such an attempt involves ongoing analysis of not only
the discourse that critics and teachers produce but also
the relations of that discourse to power and authority
in the academy. Therefore, I hope that my argument will
help students of the Prioress`s Tale to reach,
or at least to imagine, a safe distance from both the
Prioress's affective poetics and also from our own.
Without doing so, we cannot criticize either text or
criticism but rather only "feel" each along an eternal
continuum of hatred, violence, and sorrow, as we compete
with the Prioress herself to see who can be the most
"charitable" and "pitous" and who can best display both
"conscience and tendre herte."
NOTES
The author would like to thank Teresa Canosa for her help with
the initial research and conception of this essay.
1. For the critical heritage on the issues of blame and agency,
see Friedman's very useful survey and see Rex, esp. chapters 1
and 4. Both Friedman and Rex discuss the important work of
Richard J. Shoeck and of Florence Ridley. Shoeck and Rex defend
Chaucer as a satirist of the Prioress's anti-Semitism; Ridley
wrote, famously, however, that "we have no real reason for
believing that those attitudes were condemned rather than shared
by Chaucer himself" (qt. in Rex, 14). See later critics
discussed below, and see, most recently, Delany, 212-13 for a
sharp two-page summary of two main critical directions she
conveniently terms the "rigorist" and the liberal approach.
2. Fradenburg uses the term in discussing the exclusion of women
that arises when we totalize the Middle Ages as "other." While
encouraging feminist analysis of "the construction of authority
in the practice and theory of historical knowledge," she laments
that such work will not "encourage the hope of a full reparation
of our relation to the past" (1990, p. 192). Lawton quotes the
passage and later states, "Like Fradenburg, we are all committed
to history, and so to reparation" (261).
3.
The most concise and insightful study of the role of "ideology"
in contemporary Chaucer studies, with particular focus on the
Prioress's Tale itself, is Lawrence Besserman's. Studying how
Chaucer studies have "grown more markedly and self-consciously
ideological," he argues that "an ideological solidarity that may
be good for the social practice of contemporary Chaucer critics
may nevertheless be bad for their criticism." Besserman warns
that critical practices might turn one into an "ideologue,
rather than a scholar-critic seeking to contribute to the
advancement of knowledge." I thank Professor Besserman for
sharing the draft of his work in progress.
4. One of the essays, for example, studies a "melancholy for
work" in Victorian intellectual culture: "During the Gothic
revival in the nineteenth century, the hands of industrialized
and colonial laborers severed from production by power machinery
came to be spoken of in terms of a discourse of Gothic peasants
and Gothic handicraft" (12).
5. We made this comment in the context of discussing the
depiction of heterosexuality in Cleanness.
6.
The list of works linking the medieval to the modern is highly
selective but representative of the tendencies I want to note;
see also Dinshaw, who links the medieval to the modern in her
study of medieval dissident groups relating to Lollardy: "how do
communities, then and now," asks Dinshaw, "form themselves in
relation to sex?" (1). Patterson's Chaucer and the Subject of
History is one of the founding texts in this critical tradition.
See also the works surveyed by Lawton, 237-69. 7. For a critique
of this kind of curricular reform in secondary and in higher
education, see Bromwich, who notes that "since the 1960s the
place of advocacy in teaching and research has become so
prominent as almost to constitute in itself a separate
description of what scholarship in the humanities is" (220). He
further is "concerned with the genealogy and the motives of a
new academic understanding of scholarship as social action"
(223), relating it to issues of "Diversity," which he describes
as "the preferred American euphemism for the collective labor of
cheering and elevating the self-esteem of a group," and
affirmative action, which he says has fostered "a perpetual
residence for the controlled performance of sentiment" (235).
7.
For a critique of this kind of curricular reform in secondary
and in higher education, see Bromwich, who notes that "since the
1960s the place of advocacy in teaching and research has become
so prominent as almost to constitute in itself a separate
description of what scholarship in the humanities is" (220). He
further is "concerned with the genealogy and the motives of a
new academic understanding of scholarship as social action"
(223), relating it to issues of "Diversity," which he describes
as "the preferred American euphemism for the collective labor of
cheering and elevating the self-esteem of a group," and
affirmative action, which he says has fostered "a perpetual
residence for the controlled performance of sentiment" (235)
8.
See the entire essay, esp. 742ff. "The current academic
preoccupation with 'postcoloniality' and 'multiculturalism',"
argues Miyoshi, "looks suspiciously like another alibi to
conceal the actuality of global politics.... colonialism is even
more active now in the form of transnational corporatism" (728).
"It is impossible," he continues, "not to study cultures of
others; the American agenda must include 'alien' histories. But
that is merely a beginning. In the recent rise in cultural
studies and multiculturalism among cultural traders and academic
administrators, inquiry stops as soon as it begins. What we need
is a rigorous political and economic scrutiny rather than a
gesture of pedagogic expediency." The danger is that we wind up
"fully collaborating with the hegemonic ideology which looks, as
usual, as if it were no ideology at all" (751).
9. For an editorial on campus sensitivity politics and pedagogy,
see Calabrese (2000).
10.
The dangers of corporatization for medievalists in particular
were the subject of a session at the 351 International Congress
on Medieval Studies, "Medieval Studies and the Corporate Agenda
in Higher Education: What's Been Happening, What Can Be Done,"
organized by Gail Ivy Berlin and chaired by Susan Yeager. The
decline of the nation state as the locus of culture and the
relations between the corporate university and global capitalism
have been studied by Bill Reading.
11.
I use the term anti-Judaic here to refer to specifically
medieval attitudes, for the term anti-Semitic no longer conveys
this historical specificity. But some of the scholarship
discussed was written before that distinction was made; in
discussing this scholarship and the potentially anachronistic
projection of modern attitudes back into time, I use
"anti-Semitic."
12. See Dean, who prints the documents and discusses the
historical context.
13.
For example, to prepare the ground for a study of the Prioress's
morality Allen Koretsky has to level poetry and history:
"despite the anti-referential tendency of some modem literary
theory, the fact remains that the words in a story refer to real
things and circumstances outside the literary world. When
speaking about the Jews, the Prioress... is referring to a real
historical people who, in her own times, suffered tragic
persecution" (19).
14. But see Delany, who argues against the allegorical reading,
affirming the realities of the Jews living in Muslim "asia."
15. The phrase is from Patrick Brantlinger's Crusoe's
Footprints, (cited by Fish, 78).
16.
For example, Bruce Holsinger exposes Chaucer's art itself, in
all its beauty of form, as complicit in the Prioress's Tale's
doctrines of difference and violence. Studying the relations
between music and violence in medieval culture, he speaks of the
need to "corrode the gem-like elegance and poetic precision [of
the tale's] rhyme royal stanza by excavating the violent musical
representations that the 'natural music' of Chaucerian poesis
works to obscure" (192). By connecting song to various
dimensions of pedagogical and religious violence, Holsinger
argues that Christian music is a music not only of harmony for
its own people but of division and exclusion of the Jews. For a
fuller review of Holsinger's impressive argument see Calabrese
(1999).
17. See note 1 above.
18.
Those critics who mention the Holocaust directly include
Alexander, Fradenburg, Friedman, Holsinger, Spector, and Zitter.
Calabrese and Eliason, in another context, also contend that we
"recognize the presence of the seeds of the Holocaust in the
Prioress's Tale" (273).
19. In the midst of an essay devoted to Kristeva's idea of
"maternal space" and the Prioress's Tale, Corey Marvin
momentarily suspends the argument to make this avowal (46, note
15). This break allows Marvin to move forward, protected from
any possible attack to his own sense of ethics. But nonetheless
Marvin is still taken to task by Holsinger and accused of
operating under the false assumption that "musical sonority...
resists political imbrication," leading him to neglect music's
role in the tale's violence. As Holsinger sees it, such an
assertion of the "apolitical" and a neglect of "materialist
analysis" mars an "otherwise brilliant" essay (see Holsinger,
166 and note 26).
20.
Quoted for support by Fradenburg (1989, 77). But particularly
fascinating is Langmuir's discovery that "there is no evidence
of any action by secular authorities" nor even of any popular
attacks "until Henry III arrived" (1972, 468). Langmuir reveals
how one man, John, whose actual beliefs about the truth of the
accusations is unknown, manipulated the boy's death
dramatically, leading to incrimination and execution, until,
importantly, "cooler heads" prevailed, belief in a Jewish
conspiracy was dispelled and the "remaining seventy-one [Jews]
were liberated" (479).
21.
Zitter also conflates time when she demands that critics and
teachers "examine in detail the libels and misinformation
underlying the piece, studying as well those falsehoods and
misconceptions still alive today" (282).
22. I wish to express my deep debt to Fradenburg's essay while
attempting to reconsider its critical poetics over ten years
later in academic, political contexts that the author could not
have anticipated.
23.
Besserman asks the telling question: "If Chaucer writes
repeatedly about the intersection of the human and the divine
.... and if we always either deplore or ignore this aspect of
his poetry because it serves an ideology we consider noxious, or
if for this same reason, we always naturalize Chaucer's
imaginative engagements with religious concerns by translating
them into correlative social or political concerns, how are we
to justify our critical practice?"
24.
In reviewing Robert Chazan's Medieval Stereotypes and Modern
Anti-Semitism, Gow notes that "the most unconvincing part
of [the book] concerns the gap between the thirteenth and the
nineteenth centuries," continuing that the book does not make
the needed links to prove its implied thesis, "that medieval
stereotypes and modern anti-Semitism led up to and in some sense
produced the Shoah." For a modern study of the evolution and
power of the Holocaust, see also Peter Novick's provocative
study of the magnitude the Holocaust has in American life as the
definitive "emblematic Jewish experience" (10). Novick wonders
throughout the book whether such identification, for which he
provides a genealogy, "is ... good for the Jews" (11). Novick
also questions the efficacy and wisdom of "the idea of 'lessons
of the Holocaust,"' which he "finds dubious on several grounds":
"One might be called pedagogic. If there are, in fact, lessons
to be drawn from history, the Holocaust would seem an unlikely
source, not because of its alleged uniqueness, but because of
its extremity." He then questions the notion that experiencing a
Holocaust film or museum would be "morally therapeutic" (13).
Novick's study thus provides a context for considering the use
of the term in the modern criticism under study.
25.
"The refutation of the widespread notion that we can best
understand intolerance by stressing the fundamental continuity
between collective systems of thought across historical time,"
writes Nirenberg, "is an overarching goal" of his book (5).
Space does not permit here a full summary or treatment of
Nirenberg's groundbreaking book, but it is hoped that the
current argument about the literary criticism of the Prioress's
Tale will complement Nirenburg's attempt as a historian to
"disrupt a now almost orthodox view of the steady march of
European intolerance across the centuries" (7).
26. See Mat 1:2-3; 1 Macc. 2.
27. Tomasch, in fact, cites Sophia Menache's analysis of the
Burton Annals passage just quoted; see page 245 and note 12. 1
noticed Tomasch's helpful citation only after discovering the
passage myself.
28.
See also Friedman's argument that "those many critics who follow
Wordsworth in professing to be repelled by the 'fierce
bigotry,"brutality,' and horror of the Prioress's Tale, even as
they admire its artistry strike me as having panicked in
reaction to the poem's incidental anti-Semitism." Friedman
concludes, then, however, that "it is a measure of the moral
progress of humanity that modern sensibilities cannot resist
reading extrinsic tragic overtones into the Prioress's simple
tale of pathos" (127).
29. Nirenberg's analysis of teleological narratives in the
history of violence is important: "The more we restore to those
outbreaks of violence their own particularities, the less easy
it is to assimilate them to our own concerns." He argues against
those who have "drawn a line of mounting intolerance from the
Rhineland massacres of the First Crusade ... to Kristallnacht
and the concentration camps" (7).
30.
Despres studies the tale as an instance of what Rene Girard
called "persecution literature" and seems to blur history and
poetry when she asserts that the "Prioress's Tale is a fictional
account `of real violence,"' (Despres, 415 and note 9). She then
helpfully explores the significance of the tale's central image
("a small boy, lifted up to the alter, who is transformed" [see
415]) to what she calls the Prioress's "vision of an ideal
theocracy," one that to maintain purity demands a component of
anti-Judaism. She treats the poem in the context of two Corpus
Christi sermon exempla that feature eucharistic imagery, about
which she reports that "it would be historically misguided to
distinguish rigidly between such exempla and what passed for
reality" (421). Fradenburg (1989, 85ff.) explores the Christian
culture's need to define and mark the abject and disruptive,
embodied in the Jew, in order to affirm its own unity, purity,
and continuity. See also Langmuir's lucid chapter, "From
Anti-Judaism to Anti-Semitism" in Langmuir, 1990, 275-305. He
asserts, concerning the origins of medieval anti-Judaism: "[The
Jews'] existence and disbelief reinforced any doubts that were
lurking consciously or subconsciously in the minds of
Christians... Jews were therefore a real threat to any
Christians who were sensitive to threats to their identity"
(290-91).
31. One example from many is Osberg's study of the Prioress's
voice as a version of the female voice crafted by male authors
of devotional texts. He further links the imagery of revulsion
associated with the Jews to such imagery in the analogue
devotional texts (see esp. 47 ff.).
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Michael Calabrese
California State University
Los Angeles, California
See also http://www.umilta.net/Prioress.html
http://www.umilta.net/CTPrioress.html
http://www.umilta.net/judaism.html
http://www.umilta.net/JulianatCarrow.html
and https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-13855238?fbclid=IwAR2c-4DR6aUF4vdR5hFKJ7pkP9FSvWzGqNYV6mPGU1qoYP7PXa0aSno_9jE
on the skeletons
of Jewish
children, women
and men,
discovered in a
medieval well in
Norwich.
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