Deviations from the Marian Tale

Reading the Prioress's Prologue and Tale in conjunction with the selections from Rubin's Gentile Tales was a very helpful reminder of the importance of historical context. Just as the question of whether Chaucer was a misogynist or simply expressing the commonly held views of his time in the Legend of Good Women arose, the Prioress's Tale made me wonder whether she should be read as a flagrant anti-semite or simply the typical Christian in the fourteenth century. The Rubin tale both clarified and complicated this question for me: the fact that this was a commonly held opinion of the time does answer part of the question, but the very drastic changes she makes to the traditional Marian tale raise even more questions. The Prioress makes several changes: first of all, the boy is Christian (497) and not a Jew, and he is not thrown in an oven by his father but rather is murdered (quite differently, but very violently all the same) by "an homicide" (575) that was "yhired by Jews" (575). This change seemed very striking to me: whereas it is still obviously expresses some anti-Semitism, the fact that the Jews hired a murderer to kill the boy rather than committing the crime themselves is very different from (and to me, much less transgressive than) a Jewish father throwing his own son into an oven. The Prioress also describes that "oure firste foo, the serpent Sathanas" (560) was the one to provoke the Jews to action. This too is very significant: by having Satan be the instigator, it makes the Jew's actions seem somewhat less forgivable, since Satain also even compelled many Christians to deviate from their path to God in the Bible. Finally, the last striking difference I found was the fact that the boy does not live at the end of the tale, but rather eventually passes (the Prioress says that the monk removes the grain from his tongue and "yaf up the goost ful softely" [672]). Again, this is an incredibly important change to the traditional tale, in which the boy comes out of the oven unscathed due to the protection of the Virgin Mary. It seems so strange to me that in the traditional tale, a Jewish boy is saved by the Virgin, yet in the Prioress's tale, a Christian boy dies. These three changes all to me seem actually much more sympathetic to Jews than the traditional Marian tale described by Rubin. Is it possible that this tale really is not about anti-Semitism at all?