Abstract
In late fourteenth-century England a Christian writer allows to be retold an antisemitic tale that first appeared in the twelfth century, but whose immediate historical origins lie in events at the end of the eleventh century and whose deep origins go back almost to the beginning of historical time, to the story of Abraham and Isaac. The reteller Chaucer chooses for this performance is a superior member of contemporary English female monasticism, but one who is unable to distinguish between present events and those, like the murder of little Hugh of Lincoln, which she thinks occurred only “a litel while ago” (686)—while the story of Hugh’s “martyrdom” in fact emerged almost 150 years earlier, in a mid-thirteenth century England that still had a Jewish community.1 Far from irrelevant, this historical layering is central to the meaning of the tale that is now retold. For the dynamic that controls the Prioress’s Tale is created by a tension between two extremes. On the one hand is an absolutist desire for purity, on the other the obstinate historicity to which these temporal strata witness.
The Jews are for us the living words of Scripture. They are dispersed all over the world so that by expiating their crime they may be everywhere the living witnesses of our redemption. …It is an act of Christian piety both to “vanquish the proud” and also “to spare the subjected,” especially those from whom we have a law and a promise, and whose flesh was shared by Christ Whose name be forever blessed.
Bernard of Clairvanx
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
All citations from Chaucer are from Larry D. Benson, gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
According to Carleton Brown, “The Prioress’s Tale,” in W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster, eds., Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941), pp. 447–85
Luis A. Lazaro Lafuente, José Simon, and Ricardo J. Sola Buil, eds., Medieval Studies: Proceedings of the Illrd International Conference of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature (Madrid: Universidad de Alcala de Henares, 1996), pp. 151–75.
All biblical citations are from the Douay-Rheims version. The Vulgate reads: Et vidi: et ecce Agnus stabat supra montem Sion, et cum eo centum quadraginta quatuor millia, habentes nomen eius, et nomen Patris eius scriptum in frontibus suis. Et audivi vocem de caelo, tanquam vocem aquarum multarum, et tanquam vocem tonitrui magni: et vocem, quam audivi, sicut citharoedorum citharizantium in citharis suis. Et cantabant quasi canticum novum ante sedem, et ante quatuor animalia, et seniores: et nemo poterat dicere canticum, nisi ilia centum quadraginta quatuor millia, qui empti sunt de terra. Hi sunt, qui cum mulieribus non sunt coinquinati: virgines enim sunt. Hi sequuntur Agnum quocumque ierit. Hi empti sunt ex hominibus primitiae Deo, et Agno: et in ore eorum non est inventum mendacium: sine macula enim sunt thronum Dei. The relevance of the liturgy to the Tale was first explained by Marie Padgett Hamilton, “Echoes of Childermas in the Tale of the Prioress,” Modern Language Review 34 (1939): 1–8.
On the exclamatio as a feature of both Chaucerian and medieval Marian poetry generally, see Patrick S. Diehl, The Medieval Religious Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 151–2.
For the Boy Bishop ceremonies, see C. H. Evelyn-White, “The Boy Bishop (Episcopus Puerorum) of Medieval England,” Journal of the British Archaeological Association, NS 11 (1905): 30–48
S. E. Rigold, “The St. Nicholas Tokens or ‘Boy Bishop’ Tokens,” Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology 34 (1978): 87–101
J. M. J. Fletcher, The Boy-Bishop at Salisbury and Elsewhere (Salisbury: Brown and Co., 1921)
Christopher Wordsworth, Ceremonies and Processions of the Cathedral Church of Salisbury (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901), pp. 52ff.
Francis Procter and Christopher Wordsworth, eds., Breviarum ad usum insignis Sarum, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1882), cols, ccxxix–ccxlv.
J. G. Davies, ed., A New Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship (London: SCM Press, 1986), p. 26.
For the citation, see Wordsworth, Ceremonies and Processions, p. 53. The popularity— and solemnity—of the ceremony in England is stressed by the writers cited in the previous note, and even in the classic account by E. K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903), 1.336–71
Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries, c. 1275 to 1535 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), p. 312.
That medieval typological exegesis was just as ahistorical as it was allegorical (pace Auerbach et al.) is decisively argued by David Aers, Piers Plowman and Christian Allegory (London: Arnold, 1975), pp. 1–70.
Sherman Hawkins, “Chaucer’s Prioress and the Sacrifice of Praise,” Journal of English and German Philology 63 (1964): 599–624.
Louise O. Fradenburg, “Criticism, Anti-Semitism, and the Prioress’s Tale,” Exemplaria 1 (1989): 69–115
The most recent proponent of this interpretation of the “greyn” is Kathleen M. Oliver, “Singing Bread, Manna, and the Clergeon’s ‘Greyn,’” Chaucer Review 31 (1996–97): 357–64.
Sister Nicholas Maltman, O. P., “The Divine Granary, or the End of the Prioress’s ‘Greyn,’” Chaucer Review 17 (1982–83): 163–70
Isamu Saito, “‘Greyn’ of Martyrdom in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale,” in Takashi Suzuki and Tsuyoshi Mukai, eds., Arthurian and Other Studies Presented to Sunichi Noguchi (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), pp. 31–8.
Among the few critics who have discussed the links between the Shipman’s and Prioress’s Tale, the most perceptive are Hawkins, “Chaucer’s Prioress,” 621 and Jerome Mandel, Geoffrey Chaucer: Building the Fragments of the Canterbury Tales (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992), pp. 172–4.
Ann W. Astell, Chaucer and the Universe of Learning (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 184–8.
Martin Stevens, “The Royal Stanza in Early English Literature,” PMLA 94 (1979): 62–76
Robert O. Payne, The Key of Remembrance: A Study of Chaucer’s Poetics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 163–70.
Alfred David, “An ABC to the Style of the Prioress,” in Mary J. Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk, eds., Acts of Interpretation: The Text in its Contexts 700–1600: Essays in Medieval and Renaissance Literature in Honor of E. Talbot Donaldson (Norman: Pilgrim Books, 1982), pp. 147–57
Barbara Nolan, “Chaucer’s Tales of Transcendence: Rhyme Royal and Christian Prayer in the Canterbury Tales,” in C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, eds., Chaucer’s Religious Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 21–38.
I am excluding here the general analogy between the Nun’s Priest and “his” nuns and Chauntecleer and his sister hens: for a discussion, see Lawrence L. Besserman, “Chaucerian Wordplay: The Nun’s Priest and his ‘Womman Divyne,’” Chaucer Review 12 (1977–78): 68–73.
The papal attacks on the ritual murder charge have been briefly surveyed by R. J. Schoeck, “Chaucer’s Prioress: Mercy and the Tender Heart,” The Bridge: A Yearbook of Judaeo-Christian Studies 2 (1956): 239–55
Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century, vol. 1, 2d ed. (New York: Hermon Press, 1966)
Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century, vol. 2, ed. Kenneth Stow (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary, 1989).
Robert Chazan, ed., Church, State, and Jew in the Middle Ages (New York: Behrman House, 1980), pp. 123–8
For a full and convincing account of the stylistic and religious differences between the Tales of the Prioress and the Second Nun, see C. David Benson, Chaucer’s Drama of Style: Poetic Variety and Contrast in the Canterbury Tales (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), pp. 131–46.
For a full reading of the Tale along these lines, see Corey J. Marvin, “‘T Will Thee Not Forsake’: The Kristevan Maternal Space in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale and John of Garland’s Stella Maris,” Exemplaria 8 (1996): 35–58.
The Anglo-Norman ballad of “Hughes de Lincoln,” upon which Chaucer almost certainly drew, contains unmistakable suggestions of a special closeness between mother and son, a closeness that has been seen as involving incest: see Brian Bebbington, “Little Sir Hugh: An Analysis,” UNISA English Studies 9 (1971): 3–36
Alan Dundes, ed., The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Antisemitic Folklore (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 72–90.
Francisque Michel, ed., Hughes de Lincoln (Paris: Silvestre, 1834)
Abraham Hume, Sir Hugh of Lincoln; or, an Examination of a Curious Tradition respecting the Jews, with a Notice of Popular Poetry Connected with It (London: John Russell Smith, 1849).
J. A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 74.
Margaret H. Statler, “The Analogues of Chaucer’s Prioress’ Tale: The Relation of Group C to Group A,” PMLA 65 (1950), 898
Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran, The Growth of English Schooling 1340–1548: Learning, Literacy, and Laicization in Pre-Reformation York Diocese (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 24
Bruce Holsinger, “Pedagogy, Violence, and the Subject of Music: Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale and the Ideologies of’ song,’” New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997): 157–92
Alfred David, The Strumpet Muse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), pp. 209–210.
Alan Gaylord, “The Unconquered Tale of the Prioress,” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Letters 47 (1962), 634
The connection between the Virgin and miraculous speech is drawn by several other Middle English miracles of the Virgin. One recounts how the Virgin cured the cancerous throat of an otherwise speechless monk with her milk, others tell the story of a monk who could learn only the Ave maria or of a priest who could celebrate no mass but that of Our Lady, of how lilies grew in the mouths of the corpses of dead clerks devoted to the Virgin, and of how a monk’s Ave marias were transformed into rose petals as they issued from his mouth. See Beverly Boyd, The Middle English Miracles of the Virgin (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1964), pp. 123–124
For a somewhat similar account of the style of the Prioress’s Tale, see Richard H. Osberg, “A Voice for the Prioress: The Context of English Devotional Prose,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 18 (1996): 25–54.
Piero Boitani, The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 177–222
Beverly Boyd, “Chaucer’s Moments in the ‘Kneeling World,’” in Anne Clark Bartlett, et al., eds., Vox Mystica: Essays on Medieval Mysticism in Honor of Professor Valerie M. Lagorio (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 99–105.
Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, MS 95, described by M. R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1895), pp. 76–109.
Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record and Event 1000–1215, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), pp. 142
Derek Pearsall, ed., Studies in the Vernon Manuscript (Cambridge: Brewer, 1990), pp. 115–36
Peter Whiteford, ed., The Myracles of Oure Lady (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1990), p. 8
My comments on the genre of the Miracles of the Virgin are based on a reading of the following texts: Adgar, Le graciel, ed. Pierre Kunstmann (Ottawa: Editions de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1982)
Gautier de Coincy, Les Miracles de Nostre Dame par Gautier de Coincy, ed. V. Frederich Koenig, 4 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1955-70)
Nigel of Canterbury, Miracles of the Virgin Mary in Verse, ed. Jan Ziolkowski (Toronto: Centre for Medieval Studies, 1986)
Peter Whiteford, ed., The Myracles of Oure Lady (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1990)
Albert E. Hartung, gen. ed., A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1500, vol. 9 (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1993), pp. 3177–258
Brigitte Cazelles, La Faiblesse chez Gautier de Coincy (Saratoga: Anma Libri, 1978).
This group includes the miracles written by Thomas Hoccleve, “Prologue and A Miracle of the Blessed Virgin,” in Israel Gollancz, ed., Hoccleve’s Works, II: The Minor Poems, EETS, es, 73 (London: Oxford University Press, 1925), pp. 16ff.
John Lydgate, “The Legend of Dan Joos,” in H. N. MacCracken, ed., The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, Pt. 1, EETS, es, 107 (London: Oxford University Press, 1911), pp. 311–315.
Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), p. 76; cited by Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 41.
For Wyclif’s hatred of the Sarum ordinal, see Archdale A. King, Liturgies of the Past (London: Longmans, 1959), p. 283
Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 311.
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 262.
I am adapting this term from Richard Pfaff’s definition of what he calls “the liturgical person,” by which he means “the sensibility of one whose life patterns are rooted in liturgical observance and who at the same time either studies the liturgy or makes active choices about it, or both;” see Richard W. Pfaff, Liturgical Calendars, Saints, and Services in Medieval England (Aldershot: Ashgate/Variorum, 1998), p. 3.
Marie Borroff, “Loves Hete in the Prioress’s Prologue and Tale,” in Robert R. Edwards and Stephen Spector, eds., The Olde Daunce: Love, Friendship, Sex, and Marriage in the Medieval World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), pp. 229–35.
For a somewhat similar reading of the Prioress, see Robert Hanning, “From EVA to AVE to Eglentyne and Alisoun: Chaucer’s Insight into the Roles Women Play,” Signs 2 (1977): 580–99.
Critics who argue that the Miracle of the Virgin is by definition an antisemitic genre include Robert Worth Frank, Jr., “Miracles of the Virgin, Medieval Anti-Semitism, and the Prioress’s Tale,” in Larry D. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel, eds., The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1982), pp. 177–88
Denise L. Despres, “Cultic Anti-Judaism and Chaucer’s ‘Litel Clergeon,’” Modern Philology 91 (1994): 413–27
William Chester Jordan, “Marian Devotion and the Talmud Trial of 1240,” in Bernard Lewis and Friedrich Niewöhner, eds., Religionsgespräche im Mittelalter (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1992), pp. 61–76
Anna Sapir Abulafia, “Twelfth-Century Humanism and the Jews,” in Ora Limor and Guy G. Strousma, eds., Contra Iudaeos: Ancient and Medieval Polemics between Christians and Jews (Tübingen: Mohr, 1996), pp. 161–75.
William Chester Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews: From Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), p. 18.
The Tôledôt Yešû, a highly influential Jewish life of Jesus written about 200, claims not only that Jesus’s birth was illegitimate but that he was conceived during the period of his mother’s uncleanness: see Anna Sapir Abulafia, “Invectives against Christianity in the Hebrew Chronicles of the First Crusade,” in Peter W. Edbury, ed., Crusade and Settlement: Papers Read at the First Conference of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East and presented to R.C. Smail (Cardiff: University College Cardiff Press, 1985), pp. 66–72.
David Berger, ed. and trans., The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the Nizzahon Vetus (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979).
Jeremy Cohen, “Scholarship and Intolerance in the Medieval Academy: The Study and Evaluation of Judaism in Medieval Christendom,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 592–613
Jeremy Cohen, ed., Essential Papers on Judaism and Christianity in Conflict (New York: New York University Press, 1991), pp. 310–41
Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1964), pp. 112–95.
Daniel J. Lasker, Jewish Philosophical Polemics against Christianity in the Middle Ages (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1977), pp. 153–9.
This argument is well pursued by Denise L. Despres, “Mary of the Eucharist: Cultic Anti-Judaism in Some Fourteenth-Century English Devotional Manuscripts,” in Jeremy Cohen, ed., From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews and Judaism in Medieval Christian Thought, Wolfenbütteler Mittelalter-Studien (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996), pp. 88–112.
Any discussion of Jewish-Christian relations in the Middle Ages must decide whether to describe anti-Jewish practices as anti-Judaic (or anti-Jewish) or antisemitic, that is, whether they are based on religious differences or whether they define Jews as a different species or “race” from the members of the dominant culture, even as less than human. While strict accuracy would mean using one term or the other depending on the context, and while there are plenty of exceptions, it is generally agreed that in the period from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries Christian attitudes moved from anti-Judiasm to antisemitism (for a summary account, see Robert Chazan, “The Deteriorating Image of the Jews—Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” in Scott L. Waugh and Peter D. Diehl, eds., Christendom and Its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution and Rebellion, 1000–1500 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], pp. 220–33)
Robert Chazan, Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)
Gavin I. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 55–133
Gavin I. Langmuir, History, Religion, and Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 275–305
Kenneth R. Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 231–80
Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1961).
Gilbert Dahan, “Les Juifs dans les miracles de Gautier de Coincy,” Archives juives 16 (1980): 41–8
A. I. Bagby, Jr., “The Jew in the Càntigas of Alfonso X, El Sabio,” Speculum 46 (1971): 670–88.
See John A. Yunck, “‘Lucre of vileynye’: Chaucer’s Prioress and the Canonists,” Notes and Queries 205 (1960): 165–7.
See Gilbert Dahan, Les intellectuels chrétiens et les juifs au moyen âge (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1990).
Donald C. Baker, John L. Murphy, and Louis B. Hall, eds., The Late Medieval Religious Plays of Bodleian MSS Digby 133 and Museo 160, EETS, os 283 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 102
A. C. Cawley, ed., The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958), p. 75.
Stephen Spector, “Anti-Semitism and the English Mystery Plays,” in Clifford Davidson, C.J. Gianakaris, and John H. Stroup, eds., The Drama of the Middle Ages: Comparative and Critical Essays (New York: AMS Press, 1982), pp. 328–41.
Philip S. Alexander, “Madame Eglentyne, Geoffrey Chaucer and the Problem of Medieval Anti-Semitism,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 74 (1992): 109–120
Robert Adams, “Chaucer’s ‘Newe Rachel’ and the Theological Roots of Medieval Anti-Semitism,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 77 (1995): 9–18
John Archer, “The Structure of Antisemitism in the Prioress’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 19 (1984–85): 46–54
Albert B. Friedman, “The Prioress’s Tale and Chaucer’s Antisemitism,” Chaucer Review 9 (1974–75): 118–29
Emily Stark Zitter, “Antisemitism in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 25 (1990-91): 277–84
See, for example, Lisa J. Kiser, Truth and Textuality in Chaucer’s Poetry (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1991), pp. 25–41.
For the idea of “inward acculturation”—the absorption by an oppressed minority of the values of the dominant culture—see Ivan Marcus, “Jews and Christians Imagining the Other in Medieval Europe,” Prooftexts 15 (1995): 209–26.
The best account of these events can be found in two books by Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)
For the latest contribution to this interesting issue, see Jeremy Cohen, “The ‘Persecutions of 1096’—From Martyrdom to Martyrology: The Sociocultural Context of the Hebrew Crusade Chronicles,” Zion 59 (1994): 169–208
Edward Peters, ed., The First Crusade, 2d. ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), pp. 102–104.
Shlomo Eidelberg, trans. and ed., The Jews and the Crusaders: The Hebrew Chronicles of the First and Second Crusades (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), pp. 35–6.
Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade: “The major instance of more radical behavior—the self-destruction of some of the anti-Roman rebels culminating in the mass suicide at Masada—was deliberately omitted from the historical tradition of rabbinic Judaism” (p. 220). Josephus’ account of Masada was available to Jews in a tenth-century Hebrew translation ascribed to Joseph ben Gorion and with a title subsequently transliterated as Yosippon, Yosifon or Jossipon. In this version the Jews do not commit suicide but march off to die fighting. For a modern Hebrew edition, see David Flusser, ed., Sefer Yosifon, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Mosad Byalik, 1978-80).
Other important precedents were the “ten martyrs” (see Jewish Encyclopedia [New York: Funk and Wagnells, 1907]), s.v. “martyrs”; and the four captives discussed by Gerson D. Cohen, “The Story of the Four Captives,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 29 (1960): 55–131.
See W. H. C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of a Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), pp. 22–57
T. W. Manson, “Martyrs and Martyrdom,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 39 (1956-57): 463–84
Arthur J. Droge and James D. Tabor, A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom among Christians and Jews in Antiquity (San Francisco: Harper, 1992).
For a balanced survey of the various interpretations of the akedah, see Louis A. Berman, The Akedah: The Binding of Isaac (Northvale: J. Aronson, 1997)
Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
Moshe Moskowitz, “Towards a Rehumanization of the Akedah and Other Sacrifices,” Judaism 37 (1988): 288–94
Aharon R. E. Agus, The Binding of Isaac and Messiah: Law, Martyrdom and Deliverance in Early Rabbinic Religiosity (Albany: State University of New York, 1988)
Frederic Manns, The Sacrifice of Isaac in the Three Monotheistic Religions (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1995).
Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trial: On the Legends and Lore of the Command to Abraham to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice (The Akedah), trans. Judah Goldin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967).
This interaction has only begun to be described: see the works by Robert Chazan cited throughout this essay and especially the work of Ivan Marcus: “Jews and Christians Imagining the Other;” “From Politics to Martyrdom: Shifting Paradigms in the Hebrew Narratives of the 1096 Crusade Riots,” Prooftexts 2 (1982): 40–52
Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger, eds., The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
T. Carmi, ed. and trans., The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 375.
Gerson D. Cohen, “Messianic Postures of Ashkenazim and Sephardim,” in Max Kreutzberger, ed., Studies of the Leo Baeck Institute (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1967), pp. 149–50.
Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 87.
Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, p. 7. Nor is this the only Jewish imitation of Christian religious practices. The Memorbuchs that were compiled with the names of the martyrs were Jewish versions of Christian martyrologies; the piyyut or liturgical prayers for the martyrs paralleled the liturgical feasts of the Christian saints. And as Marcus has also shown, A Jewish awareness of the newly important eucharistic wafer is obliquely reflected in a new Jewish children’s initiatory rite of passage, from the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, in which small boys were brought to a Hebrew teacher and given cakes to eat baked with milk and honey and on which Hebrew alphabets and Torah phrases were inscribed. The similarity of Christians eating a wafer as the body of God who is associated in the Book of Revelations with the Greek alphabet—“I am the alpha and the omega” (Rev. 1:8, 21:6, 22:13)—and a Jewish child eating alphabet Torah cakes in order to be initiated into Torah study is highly suggestive. (“Jews and Christians Imagining the Other in Medieval Europe,” 222) Similarly, Jewish millenarianists copied Christian prophecies virtually verbatim: see David B. Ruderman, “Hope Against Hope: Jewish and Christian Messianic Expectations in the Late Middle Ages,” in Aaron Mirsky, ed., Exile and Diaspora: Studies in the History of the Jewish People Presented to Prof. Haim Beinart (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 1991), pp. 185–202.
Alan Mintz, Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984)
Chazan, Church, State, and Jew in the Middle Ages, pp. 301-303. For a discussion, see Robert Chazan, “The Blois Incident of 1171: A Study in Jewish Intercommunal Organization,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 36 (1968): 13–31.
For example, during the massacres occasioned by the plague in 1348–49 the Jews of Worms and Oppenheim set fire to their district and perished in the flames: Léon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, vol 1: From the Time of Christ to the Court Jews, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vanguard Press, 1965), p. 111.
Paul E. Grosser and Edwin G. Halperin, Anti-Semitism, Causes and Effects: An Analysis of 1900 Years of Anti-Semitic Attitudes and Practices, 2d ed. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1983), pp. 105
Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), 1.287.
Robert Chazan, “Ephraim ben Jacob’s Compilation of Twelfth-Century Persecutions,” Jewish Quarterly Review 84 (1994), 401
Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England, 3rd. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), pp. 18–25.
The events at York have been described in detail by R. Barrie Dobson, The Jews of Medieval York and the Massacre of March 1190 (York: St. Anthony’s Press, 1974)
Robert Chazan, “The Timebound and the Timeless: Medieval Jewish Narration of Events,” History and Memory 6 (1994), 28.
Richard Howlett, ed., Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, Rolls Series 82, vol. 1 (London: Stationery Office, 1884), pp. 312–322
Joseph Stevenson, trans., The Church Historians of England (London: Seeleys, 1858), vol. 4, pt. 1, pp. 565–71.
Jonathan Riley-Smith, “The First Crusade and the Persecution of the Jews,” Studies in Church History 21 (1984), 56.
Flavius Josephus, The Great Roman-Jewish War: A.D. 66–70 (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), pp. 266–73.
Henry T. Riley, trans., Annals of Roger de Hoveden (Felinfach: Llanerch Publishers, 1997), vol. 2, pt. 1, p. 137.
Mary Minty, “Kiddush ha-Shem in German-Christian Eyes in the Middle Ages,” Zion 59 (1994): 209–66
François Berier, “L’Humaniste, le prêtre et l’enfant mort: le sermon De Sanctis innocentibus de Nicolas de Clamages,” in L’Enfant au Moyen-Age, Senefiance 9 (Aix-en-Provence: Imprimerie de l’Université de Provence, 1980), pp. 125–40.
Cecil Roth, “A Hebrew Elegy on the York Martyrs of 1190,” in Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 16 (1945–51): 213–220.
Ephraim Kanarfogel, “Attitudes Toward Childhood and Children in Medieval Jewish Society,” in David R. Blumenthal, ed., Approaches to Judaism in Medieval Times, 2 vols. (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1985), 2.1–15
Magdalene Schultz, “The Blood Libel: A Motif in the History of Childhood,” Journal of Psychohistory 14 (1986): 1–24
For a specific example of a Jewish child kidnapped during the massacre at Rouen, and then hidden from his surviving parents in a monastery, as well as comments on this as a general Christian practice, see Norman Golb, “New Light on the Persecution of French Jews at the Time of the First Crusade,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 34 (1966), 20–21
It should be added here that another element of the Christian fear of Jews—the ubiquitous notion that Jews were inveterate and perfidious haters of Christ and Christianity—was also inflamed by the massacres. Having committed these atrocities against their Jewish neighbors, what Christian could avoid the thought that Jews wished revenge? Nor were they entirely wrong, as many Hebrew poems witness. An example are these verses composed by R. Menachem ben Jacob ben Solomon ben Menachem about the events of 1096 and edited and translated by Solomon Schechter, “A Hebrew Elegy,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 1 (1893–94): 8–14
The Fleury Plays are edited in Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933).
Giampiero Tintori, ed., Sacre rappresentazioni nel manoscritti 201 della Bibliothéque municipale d’Orléans (Cremona: Athenaeum Cremonese, 1958).
Fletcher Collins, Jr., Medieval Church Music-dramas: A Repertory of Complete Plays (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976)
Solange Corbin, “Le manuscript 201 d’Orléans: Drames liturgiques dits de Fleury,” Romania 74 (1953): 1–43
Fletcher Collins, Jr., “The Home of the Fleury Playbook,” in Thomas P. Campbell and Clifford Davidson, eds., The Fleury Playbook: Essays and Studies, Early Drama, Art, and Music Monograph Series, 7 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985), pp. 26–34.
V. A. Kolve, “Ganymede/Son of Getron: Medieval Monasticism and the Drama of Same-Sex Desire,” Speculum 73 (1998): 1014–67
Hilarius Aurelianensis, Versus et Ludi, Epistolae, Ludus Danielis Belouacensis, ed. Walther Bulst and M. L. Bulst-Thiele (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989), pp. 43–46
Jehan Bodel, Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas, ed. Albert Henry, 2d. ed. (Brussels: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles, 1965), line 9, p. 60.
Joseph H. Hertz, ed. and trans., Siddur: The Authorized Daily Prayer Book (New York: Bloch, 1948), pp. 208–11.
That there was a sizable Jewish community at Laon is shown by its inclusion among those who acceded to regulations promulgated by rabbinical synods held in Troyes between 1150 and 1160: see Norman Golb, Les juifs de Rouen an moyen âge (Rouen: Publications of the University of Rouen, 1985), p. 160.
Karl Young, Ordo Rachelis, University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, 4 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1919).
The tale has been discussed in relation to host desecration narratives by Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 7–39.
According to Cooke in the Manual of the Writings in Middle English, there are 33 versions of this tale in 68 manuscripts (10.3225); to Cooke’s bibliography of scholarship on the tale (pp. 3529-30) should be added the most recent contribution, Heike A. Burmeister, Der “Judenknabe:” Studien und texte zu einem mittelalterlichen Marienmirakel in deutscher Überlieferung (Göppingen: Kümmerle Verlag, 1998).
The idea that Jewish behavior influenced either Christian antisemitic stereotypes or acts of persecution is, unsurprisingly, controversial. For some contributions to the debate set off by Israel J. Yuval, “Vengeance and Damnation, Blood and Defamation: From Jewish Martyrdom to Blood Libel Accusations,” Zion 58 (1993): 33–90
For the different versions of the Tale, see Carleton Brown, A Study of the Miracle of Our Lady Told by Chaucer’s Prioress, Chaucer Society Publications, Second Series, no. 45 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1910)
R. W. Southern, “The English Origins of the Miracles of the Virgin,” Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies 4 (1958): 176–216.
Adolfo Mussafia, “Über die von Gautier de Coincy benutzen Quellen,” Denkschriften der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaft in Wien, philosophische-historische Classe 44 (1896): 1–58
Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson, eds., Chaucer Life-Records (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 64–5.
For the war and English involvement, see P. E. Russell, The English Intervention in Spain and Portugal in the Reigns of Edward III and Richard II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), pp. 84–148
Cuvelier, La chanson de Bertrand du Guesclin, ed. Jean-Claude Faucon, 3 vols. (Toulouse: Editons du Sud, 1990-91), 3.122–25.
The chronicle report is by Samuel Çarça and is printed (in Hebrew) in Fritz Baer, Die Juden im Christlichen Spanien, vol. 1, pt. 2 (Berlin: Schocken, 1936), pp. 200–201.
Abraham Halkin, trans., Crisis and Leadership: Epistles of Maimonides, ed. David Hartman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1985), pp. 13–90.
See, for example, José Hinojosa Montalvo, The Jews of the Kingdom of Valencia from Persecution to Expulsion, 1391–1492 (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1993), p. 35
Franz Kobler, ed., A Treasury of Jewish Letters, 2 vols. (London: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952), 1.272–5.
H.J. Zimmels, Ashkenazim and Sephardim: Their Relations, Differences, and Problems as Reflected in the Rabbinical Responsa (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 262–6.
Joe Hillaby, “The Ritual-Child-Murder Accusation: Its Dissemination and Harold of Gloucester,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 34 (1994–96): 69–109.
H. M. Colvin, gen. ed., The History of the King’s Works (London: Stationery Office, 1963), p. 485.
Christopher Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 1095–1588 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 231.
Roger Kohn, Les juifs de la France du Nord dans la seconde moitié du XlVe siècle (Louvain: E. Peeters, 1988), pp. 261–3.
For the English interest in crusading, see J. J. N. Palmer, England, France and Christendom, 1311–99 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 180–210
William Barber, trans., “The History of the Monastery of St. Peter of Gloucester,” in David Welander, The History, Art and Architecture of Gloucester Cathedral (Phoenix Mill: Alan Sutton, 1991), pp. 597–639.
Paul Olson, The Canterbury Tales and the Good Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 136.
Andrew Sharf, “An Armenian King at the Court of Richard II,” in Pinhas Artzi, ed., Bar-Ilan Studies in History (Ramat-Gan, Israel: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1978), pp. 115–28.
Philippe de Mézières, Letter to King Richard II, trans. G. W. Coopland (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976).
For this aspect of Richard’s piety, and a discussion of the Wilton Diptych, see Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 303–8
Dillian Gordon, Making and Meaning: The Wilton Diptych (London: National Gallery, 1993), pp. 59–60.
This event has given rise to the idea that the Prioress’s Tale was written as a commemoration for it: Sumner Ferris, “Chaucer at Lincoln (1387): The Prioress’s Tale as a Political Poem,” Chaucer Review 15 (1980-81): 295–321.
Michael Adler, Jews of Medieval England (London: Jewish Historical Society of England, 1939), pp. 322–23.
There was at least one precedent for Richard’s presence at the baptism of this convert: King Louis IX of France was present...when ‘a Jew of great renown’ was baptized. This happened just before his departure in 1270 to his second and last crusade. Louis insisted that the envoys of the King of Tunisia, then in Paris, be present at the ceremony. See Joseph Shatzmiller, “Jewish Converts to Christianity in Medieval Europe,” in Michael Goodich, Sophia Menache and Sylvia Schein, eds., Cross Cultural Convergences in the Crusader Period: Essays Presented to Aryeh Grabois on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), p. 304.
For the institution of compulsory sermons in England, see Roth, History of the Jews in England, pp. 78-9. Conversionary sermons had been made compulsory in Spain in 1240, and in other European countries soon after: see Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: A Study in the Development of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).
For such responses, see Robert Chazan, Daggers of Faith: Thirteenth-Century Christian Missionizing and Jewish Response (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
Copyright information
© 2006 Lee Patterson
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Patterson, L. (2006). “The Living Witnesses of Our Redemption”: Martyrdom and Imitation in the Prioress’s Tale. In: Temporal Circumstances. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08451-4_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08451-4_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-73736-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-08451-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)