The Critics and the Prioress: Antisemitism, Criticism, and Chaucer's "Prioress's Tale" by Heather Blurton and Hannah Johnson (review)

There are few books that place the literary critic, rather than the text, beneath the analytical lens as cogently and delightfully as Heather Blur-ton and Hannah Johnson's excellent new account of the scholarship on Chaucer's Prioress's Tale. Following in the footsteps of Florence Ridley's The Prioress and the Critics (1965), Blurton and Johnson document how a range of debates about the tale's anti-Semitic content, highly gendered narrator, and investment in Marian theology have revealed almost as much about the historical and theoretical affinities of the critic as they have about the text itself. Moreover, as they argue, the discipline of medieval literary studies has itself been shaped by the controversies at play with regard to Chaucer's Prioress; through the prism of that "greet cite" in "Asye," Blurton and Johnson identify the sometimes irreconcilable conflicts that have come to light between the demands of the aesthetic and the ethical. In The Prioress's Tale, four or five generations of critics have found a ready space to explore the limits of literary pleasure and moral responsibility.

Blurton and Johnson begin the book with a chapter that previews and encapsulates much of the material that is to follow. It is here in this chapter, titled "The Critics and the Prioress: A Retrospective," that the two authors directly engage the dominant theme of critical discussions of Chaucer's poem: the rampant anti-Semitism of the story it tells. The facts of the tale—the child-like Prioress, the little clergeon murdered by Jews, the Jews murdered in turn by vengeful Christian justice, the Virgin Mary's intervention on behalf of the little clergeon—form a façade of stability around which the sharp changes in critical interpretation have thronged. This chapter is a masterpiece of literary and critical cohesion, and its potential as a reference tool for future scholars of Chaucer is limitless. I thought I had read almost all the extant criticism on The Prioress's Tale, but found almost immediately that I had not. The chapter is particularly strong on the postwar critics of the tale, and its commentary on the way in which satirical reading became the tool to exculpate Chaucer from identification with the anti-Semitism of his own text is fully persuasive. Blurton and Johnson draw a clear line between postwar satirical readings that focus on the character of the Prioress (almost always to that lady's disadvantage) and those non-satirical postwar readings that emphasize the literary, aesthetic, and devotional.

Not only is this opposition well argued, but it masterfully sets the stage for the next critical opposition to be discussed by Blurton and Johnson, namely that between "ethics and historicism." If the previous section divided critical opinion according to the critic's comfort or discomfort with an anti-Semitic Chaucer, then here Blurton and Johnson establish a critical conflict according to whether the critic treats the tale as an object of cruelty or beauty in their analysis. Those critics who wished to find beauty within the story followed earlier scholars in shunting the brutality of the narrative onto its narrator, whereas those critics who considered the tale a direct ethical challenge to the contemporary reader focused not on the aesthetic, but on Chaucer (and the critic's) culpability in perpetuating such a violent literary artifact. And yet, while Blurton and Johnson tend to emphasize the disagreements among critics in this section, they increasingly acknowledge the overlaps among critical methodologies. For example, while they take Louise Fradenburg's significant 1989 essay "Criticism, Anti-Semitism, and the Prioress's Tale" as the pioneering text for the ethical move, they also note that the dichotomy Fradenburg drew between herself and "historicists" such as Lee Patterson and Lawrence Besserman became quite blurred over time, with both Patterson and Besserman producing...