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Abstract: This issue is dedicated to a dark topic in Canterbury Tales studies, here given a meditative and provocative title: What We Think About When We Think About the Prioress's Tale. In articles gathered by Susan Nakley and Karla Taylor, six contributing authors reflect deeply upon how students of Chaucer might best understand—indeed learn from and teach—the Prioress's Tale amid the fraught and ugly vicissitudes of today's political world, where both antisemitism and Islamophobia openly and stubbornly persist. Collectively, these authors put aside the old, long-standing debate over whether the tale's blatant anti-Judaism is to be assigned to its author or to its teller. Instead, priority is given to the more pressing ... Read More PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The conditions of human culture from the material to the ethical have transformed since the Canterbury Tales appeared, yet uncanny bigotries abound. Today, the medieval English antisemitism of Chaucer's Prioress Tale "stands in troubled relation to the lived realities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries," as Heather Blurton and Hannah Johnson write in The Critics and the Prioress.1 So, too, do other forms of anti-Judaism that the tale conjures. Since the 2017 publication of Blurton and Johnson's book, the space between now and then has grown fraught with the pressure of political extremism, racism, police violence, pandemic, and war. Our special issue responds to their work by interrogating the distance ... Read More PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Near the end of the late fourteenth-century Siege of Jerusalem comes the notorious scene of a starving mother committing an act of cannibalism:On Marie, a myld wyf, for meschef of foode,Hire owen barn that ho bare ho brad on the gledis,Rostyth rigge and rib with rewful wordes,Sayth, "Sone, upon eche side our sorow is alofte:"Batail aboute the borwe our bodies to quelle,Withyn hunger so hote that negh our herte brestyth.Therfor yeld that I thee gaf, and agen tourneAnd entre ther thou cam out," and etyth a schouldere.The smel roos of the rost right into the strete,That fele fastyng folke felden the savere;Doun thei daschen the dore: dey scholde the berdeThat mete yn this meschef hadde from men ... Read More PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In 1886, Édouard Adolphe Drumont, journalist, fervent Catholic, and public agitator, published La France juive, a two-volume "essai d'histoire contemporaine" that was one of the most popular books of the century and most virulently antisemitic works ever published. In 1,200 pages, Drumont compiled a history of France from the Middle Ages to his present, focusing on what he perceived as the Jewish "conquest" of France in modern times. In the book's first year, the publisher Marpon & Flammarion sold over 100,000 copies; by the beginning of World War I, it had published more than 200 editions, and it continued publishing the book after World War II.1 In 2013, the Franco-Swiss neo-Nazi Alain Soral republished La France ... Read More PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In 1307, among other proofs of sanctity in the hagiography being collected for the canonization process of English bishop Thomas de Cantilupe (d. 1282), the compiler of the dossier included the testimony of Ralph de Hengham (d. 1311), Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas. Hengham reported a non-miraculous but praiseworthy incident from the bishop's past. Cantilupe had successfully prevented the inclusion of a royally favored convert, Henry of Winchester, as a justice during the 1277–78 coin-clipping trials. As the compiler explained:Namely, [the Bishop] judged that it was unworthy and not at all pleasing to God to subject Christ's faithful, born from Christian parents, to a man who had only recently ... Read More PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: I taught the Prioress's Tale for the first time on November 9, 2016—the anniversary of Kristallnacht and the day after Election Day in the United States. The morning news told of swastikas spray-painted across the country the night before—a harbinger of the exponential rise in antisemitic violence in the months and years to come. As I wondered how I would teach anything that day, T. H. White's Merlin came figuratively to the rescue. I remembered how he tells a young Arthur to "learn something" when the world and one's purpose in it seem hopelessly thrown out of orbit.1 So into the classroom I went to learn something with my students. Upon entering, I wrote a single question on the board, as I routinely do to mark ... Read More PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The promotional blurb of the 2022 documentary Whose Children Are They': Exposing the Hidden Agenda in America's Schools calls on parents, teachers, and "concerned citizens" to band together "for the innocence and well-being of our children."1 Whose Children attacks the teaching of critical race theory and advocates for the dismantling of teachers' unions. It was promoted in numerous right-wing media venues, including Fox News, with the phrases quoted above.2 In an interview with far-right media platform RT America, a Rhode Island woman being sued by the National Education Association (a major teacher's union), after allegedly mounting a campaign of harassment against her child's public kindergarten, used similar ... Read More PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: I'm gathering my thoughts about the Prioress's Tale for an essay that will be the basis for remarks I'm to give at the meeting of the New Chaucer Society the following July at a panel entitled "What We Think About When We Think About the Prioress's Tale." I think about The Critics and The Prioress (2017), coauthored by Heather Blurton and Hannah Johnson, which inspired both the special issue I'm writing for and the conference panel I'm participating in. Blurton and Johnson, who describe their work as "retrospective" (10), link the tale's meaning with the various moments of its reception: "historical context must be taken seriously as a means for understanding the tale's fraught after-life." They elaborate: ... Read More PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: One of the chief fictions of a literary work is to summon its own competent reader. Gian Biagio Conte argues that an author not only "presupposes the competence of his (or her) own Model Reader" but also "establishes" that competence."2 Many of the distinctive formal features of the Canterbury Tales—the poet's reticence (Chaucerian "irony"); Chaucer's fiction of rehearsal; and the distributed authorship, with the layered narrative voices resulting from his pose as a compiler of the prior words of others—cooperate to shape a space for the interpretative acts of the reader it seeks to summon into existence.3 To this reader, the poet cedes a remarkable autonomy, as in the apology of the Miller's Prologue, where ... Read More PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00
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