Manuscript Readings We Don’t Think About in the Prioress’s Tale

Abstract

ABSTRACT Criticism of the Prioress’s Tale has hinged on the question of irony: was Chaucer, in his portrait of the Prioress, also holding up her tale for mockery? Does her antisemitic exemplum collapse upon itself? Recent work has shown that fifteenth-century Marian anthologies deliberately stripped the text of its Canterbury Tales frame and identifiable pilgrim-speaker, in order to put it back into the context of the miracle genre from which it developed. So far, however, there has not been a general study of how its scribes responded to the tale, and how the variants that they introduced inform our understanding of whether they took it to be sincere or ironic or somewhere in between. This article springs from editing the Prioress’s Tale, and from the fact that most editions are so sparing in the variants that they can include in their textual apparatus that this body of evidence disappears from view.