irony in the Prioress' tale (?)

Like Carlos, I'm finding it quite difficult to read the tale as anything other than blatant anti-semitism. (Though Courtney raises a good point about historical context and the "woman question" parallel.) Nonetheless, I scoured it for irony and found a handful of ambiguous, wormy asides. The first thing that I found curious was the lack of framing-- we receive the Prioress' Prologue sans quotation marks, with only a "--quod she" (453) to fray the immediacy of her point of view. The lack of quotations does, worryingly, suggest that the Prioress' views merge seamlessly with the narrator's (as does the use of "oure" throughout), yet the "quod she" could frustrate that reading. It isn't a solitary occurrence, either; the "quod she" appears a second time in the narrative, again tripping up the Prioress' rhapsodizing: "The white lamb celestial-- quod she--" (581). Each time, the "quod she" undercuts the momentum of the Prioress' narrative, and perhaps fuels the argument that there is some sort of skeleton of Chaucerian irony underlying the tale.

To bolster this, I'd point to two other instances where Chaucer seems to be invoking the sly aside: "as monkes been-- or elles oghte be [holy]--" (643) and "This hooly monk, this abbot, hym meene I" (670). The second example shows the descent from holiness to progressively more human institutions ("abbot," highlighting administrative rather than holy function) and subjectivity ("hym meene I"), again planting a seed (... or a field's worth) of doubt as to the Prioress' objectivity. While this is the slimmest of evidence to go on, it was the best my irony reconnaissance mission could dredge up.