Chaucer’s Clergeon, or towards holiness in "The Prioress’s Tale"
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Date
2007
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Adam Mickiewicz University
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Abstract
A narrative aestheticized in Pre-Raphaelite visual arts and a politically charged issue in contemporary
criticism, Chaucer’s Prioress’s tale focuses on the figure of an “enigmatic child”, whose body is
severed by the Jews. The boy’s uncanniness and holiness are constructed in stages, while the ethnic
identity of his persecutors may not be as important as some critics once thought, since the Jews
function as yet another group of “infidels” in Chaucer. The clergeon symbolizes otherness through
his deformity, which makes him similar to the Jews as embodiments of difference. However, only
the contrast between the child and the Jews is emphasized. Middle English dramatizations of the
Slaughter of the Innocents could be read as yet another source influencing Chaucer. A parallelism
between the clergeon’s suffering and the persecution of Christ typified by the slaughter can be traced
in the two tales. At the end of The Prioress’s tale the boy achieves holiness, while violence is directed
against ethnic others. The highly aesthetic Victorian representation merely continues to show
this narrative of violence as primarily a work about Marian devotion.
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Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 43 (2007), pp. 251-264
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0081-6272