Creating a Martyr: Rhetoric, Chaucer’s “The Prioress’ Tale,” and the Death of the “Litel Clergeon”

Chaucer’s “The Prioress’ Tale” is, in part, a story of martyrdom. A “litel clergeon” memorizes a Marian hymn in Latin, sings it through the Jewish ghetto on his way to and from school, and is killed by a “cursed Jew” (VII.503, 570). On his death, the Virgin Mary places a grain on his tongue to allow him to continue to sing her praises until his body is discovered. When the Christian townspeople find him in the ghetto, the magistrate orders the deaths of all members of the Jewish community who knew of the murder. According to Chaucer’s Prioress, that the clergeon is killed by a Jew while performing a song he doesn’t understand makes him a martyr.

As the Prioress would have her audience believe, it matters neither that the child doesn’t understand the antiphon—he hasn’t yet learned Latin—nor that he willfully disobeys his teachers in order to learn it. What is of vital importance, at least superficially, is that the young clergeon dies a monstrously grotesque death at the hands of a Jew. Unfortunately, this curiously overt anti-Semitism entices many critics into dismissing the poetic narrative as what Robert W. Frank calls “gratuitous and perverse” (177). Others focus on issues of moral culpability. Michael Calabrese, for example, argues that “Someone . . . must be to blame for the hatred depicted in the tale—Chaucer, the Prioress, the Christian community that has produced them both” (66). Denise Despres, taking another approach, claims that the tale is ultimately about “purgation and hieratic order” (424). Although “The Prioress’ Tale” is a strange combination of seeming religious devotion and blatant religious racism, there is another, more compelling issue that needs to be addressed: the Prioress, through her skillful use of rhetoric, martyrs a child for the sole reason that he performed a song about the Virgin Mary. But, does the simple regurgitation of uncomprehended language warrant such an elevated response? On the surface, it appears as though the Prioress wholly believes that the clergeon deserves to serve as a champion of the Christian faith. If this were the case, however, then the fact that she employs highly sophisticated rhetoric to accomplish this goal is peculiar. What I would like to suggest is that through his Prioress, Chaucer reveals the potential for language to shape understanding while using that power to achieve the Prioress’ selfish and disturbing ends.

From the moment she accepts the Host’s invitation to tell the next tale, the Prioress carefully establishes the appearance of devout piety one would expect from a religious figure of her standing by first praising the Lord and then invoking the help of the Virgin. While these gestures are appropriate, Madame Eglentyne—which is the name she goes by—warps both the praise and the supplication for two reasons: to insist on her audience’s common spiritual identity and to renounce her personal responsibility for the ensuing tale. By beginning her prologue with “O Lord, oure Lord, thy name how merveillous / Is in this large world ysprad,” she constructs a religious community among the pilgrim audience through her assertion that the Lord to whom she prays is “our” Lord (VII.453–53, emphasis mine).¹ As she assumes the role of the appointed speaker of her pious congregation, the Prioress’ prologue, and thus her tale, include the pilgrims for whom she speaks; the tale is not spoken to them, it is about them.

Interestingly, after she pulls the pilgrims into a fictive congregation, the Prioress removes herself from that group in an attempt to eliminate her personal agency from the tale. While seeming to devote the remainder of her prologue to the virtues of Jesus and Mary, the Prioress invests time to create a parallel between herself and the Virgin. This parallel first appears as a bond of motherhood when the Prioress proclaims that “To telle a storie [she] wol do [her] labour” (VII.463). As the Virgin bore Christ, so the Prioress bears forth her tale. Eglentyne further establishes this similarity at the end...