ABSTRACT
One of Chaucer's most notorious tales is hardly longer than 200 lines, and repackages a hackneyed Marian miracle story as art. As recipes for controversy go, this does not seem like a promising beginning. If Fradenburg offers a manifesto in defense of theory that takes The Prioress’s Tale as its test case, Patterson offers an implicitly corrective reading that takes up Fradenburg's ethical challenge within a resolutely historicist perspective. Critics have felt compelled to acknowledge that The Prioress’s Tale carries significant ethical challenges for the post-Holocaust reader, though the specific nature of the dilemma is often taken for granted rather than adequately defined. Aranye Fradenburg's 1989 essay, “Criticism, Anti-Semitism, and The Prioress’s Tale,” was prescient in a number of ways. By emphasizing the centrality of Christian ideas about Jews to Christian identity, her work offers a forecast of contemporary historicist deconstructions.
