Criticism, Anti-Semitism, and the Prioress's Tale

Let us turn, now, to what the Prioress's Tale can tell us about the many critical questions that criticism on the tale has left unaddressed. The Prioress's Prologue begins as follows: O Lord, oure Lord, thy name how merveillous Is in this large world ysprad—quod she— For noght oonly thy laude precious Parfourned is by men of dignitee, But by the mouth of children thy bountee Parfourned is, for on the brest soukynge Somtyme shewen they thyn heriynge. ¹ From the very beginning of the Prioress's Tale divinity is linked with the concept of the marvelous, specifically with the marvelous capacity of the disembodied name of the Lord to spread throughout the “large world,” to achieve fully creative extension. (In Psalm 8 the Lord's magnificence is “elevated above the heavens”; the Prioress's leveling figure brings the disembodied and distant magnificence of the Lord down into the sphere of worldly production and reproduction, where the Lord's “name” [rather than, as in Psalm 8, his magnificence] will be substantiated. ² ) The Lord's name achieves this extension through the performing of his “laude precious” by “men of dignitee” and the “mouth of children,” but this dependence of the Lord's name for its marvelous fertility upon the voices of men and children is elided, first by displacing the voice with the image of the “mouth” performing the “bountee” of the Lord (so that the childish singer is somehow embodied through his singing) and then by the displacement, in turn, of that image with the more precisely visualized “on the brest soukynge / Somtyme shewen they thyn heriynge.” By this time, the syntax of the stanza has become so ambiguous that it is not even possible to say whether the infant's “heriynge” is a form of speech, an exercise of the human voice, or consists simply of sucking at the “bountee” of the Lord through the medium of the (partially represented) mother's body; thus at stake in this passage is also the appropriation of woman's role in reproduction by God's making, a situation of which we are reminded when the “bountee” of the Virgin Mary is mentioned twice in the next three stanzas.