Mythologizing the Jewish Other in “The Prioress’s Tale”

Abstract

A century after the banishment of the Jews from England, Geoffrey Chaucer penned the Tale. The Tale metamorphosed from a medieval religious myth to a modern secular one that adapted to a changing culture despite of and because of its troubling anti-Semitism, as commentaries on the tale illustrate. The Tale became one of the most copied and anthologized of all the Canterbury Tales . Early reception of the tale with its negative portrayals of Jews has been difficult to gauge because of the lack of evidence. The Tale is a descendant of the Christian myth of ritual murder, which served as a perverse opposite to saints' legends. Chaucer's Jews are now constructed as an affirmation of free speech, and so the Tale perseveres as a myth encoding the religious, social, and political values of the culture in which it is read. Keywords: Geoffrey Chaucer; Jews; political values; Prioress's Tale; religious myth