Abstract
Of the ‘nyne and twenty’ pilgrims whom Chaucer joins for the journey to Canterbury, only three are women: the Prioress, the Second Nun and the Wife of Bath. All three tell a story, but in the General Prologue there are portraits only of the Prioress and the Wife. Whereas the men are defined in terms of a large number of professions — knight, innkeeper, parson, ploughman, merchant, lawyer, etc. — we see women in only two roles; the nun and the married woman. Each is defined in terms of sexuality or its renunciation, each defined, in a sense, in relation to men.
Ther was also a Nonne …
CT I 118
A good Wif was ther …
CT I 445
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Notes
See Ruth Mohl, The Three Estates in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (New York, 1933) especially pp. 20–1,
and Shulamith Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages (London and New York, 1983) especially pp. 1–8.
Studies of the portraits include Muriel Bowden, A Commentary on the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (London, 1948) pp. 92–104, 214–29;
R. M. Lumiansky, Of Sondry Folk: The Dramatic Principle in The Canterbury Tales (Austin, Tx, 1955) pp. 79–83, 117–29;
H. F. Brooks, Chaucer’s Pilgrims (London, 1962) pp. 15–19, 31–3.
A distinction first made by E. T. Donaldson in ‘Chaucer the Pilgrim’, PMLA, LXIX (1954) pp. 77–96,
and reprinted in Chaucer Criticism, ed. R. Schoeck and J. Taylor (Notre Dame, Ind., 1960) vol. 2, pp. 1–134.
J. L. Lowes, ‘Simple and Coy: A Note on Fourteenth-Century Poetic Diction’, Anglia, 33 (1910) pp. 440–51.
Hope P. Weissman, ‘Antifeminism and Chaucer’s Characterization of Women’, in Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. George D. Economou (New York, 1975) pp. 93–110.
Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge 1973) pp. 134–7, discusses ‘spiritual courtesy … the ladylike aspect of the spiritual life’ (p. 134).
In ‘Sense and Sensibility in the Prioress’s Tale’, ChR, 15 (1980) pp. 138–82, Carolyn B. Collette places the Prioress’s taste and temperament in the mainstream of late medieval spirituality. See also Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (London, 1924) especially ch. xiv.
A characteristically harsh appraisal of the Prioress as ‘a particularly striking exemplar of false courtesy’ is made by D. W. Robertson, Jr, A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton, NJ, 1963) p. 246.
A similar judgement is made on the basis of a detailed examination of the semiology of the portrait by Chauncey Wood, ‘Chaucer’s Use of Signs in the Portrait of the Prioress’, in Signs and Symbols in Chaucer’s Poetry, ed. John P. Hermann and John J. Burke Jr (University of Alabama, 1977) pp. 81–101.
In a learned and influential article, ‘Chaucer’s Prioress: Mercy and Tender Heart’, reprinted in Chaucer Criticism, ed. R. J. Schoeck and J. Taylor (Notre Dame, Ind. 1961) vol. II, pp. 245–58, R. J. Schoeck argues that the ‘ritual murder legend is held up for implicit condemnation as vicious and hypocritical’ (p. 246). This view is not accepted by Florence Ridley, The Prioress and the Critics (Berkeley, Cal. 1965);
G. H. Russell, ‘Chaucer: The Prioress’s Tale’, in Medieval Literature and Civilisation, ed. D. A. Pearsall and R. W. Waldron (London, 1969);
J. R. Hirsh, ‘Reopening the Prioress’s Tale’, ChR, 10 (1975) pp. 30–45.
See David Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators (Cambridge, 1985)
and C. Benson, Chaucer’s Drama of Style: Poetic Variety and Contrast in The Canterbury Tales (Chapel Hill, NC and London, 1986) and ‘The Canterbury Tales: Personal Drama or Experiments in Poetic Variety?’, in The Cambridge Chaucer Companion, ed. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge, 1986).
‘[The Jews] are symbols of pure evil, and they belong to a large class of fairy-tale villains. … The tale is certainly appropriate for the Prioress because it brings out the childlike qualities that are evident in her portrait and in her Prologue’. Alfred David, The Strumpet Muse (Bloomington, Ind. and London, 1976) pp. 208–9.
Roger Ellis, Patterns of Religious Narrative in the Canterbury tales (London and Sydney, 1986), believes that the ‘childlike’ attitude of the Prioress to her story is implicitly criticised (pp. 78–9) and suggests that the punishment of the Jews in an ‘incongruous development’ (p. 80) in contrast to the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English analogues of the story (pp. 79–81).
See W. C. Curry, Chaucer and the Medieval Sciences (New York, 1926, 2nd edn 1960) and Wood, Chaucer and the Country of the Stars.
Proverbs vii 10–12. See G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1933) pp. 385–404; Bowden, Commentary on the General Prologue, p. 219; and Weissman, ‘Antifeminism’.
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© 1996 Priscilla Martin
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Martin, P. (1996). Two Misfits: The Nun and the Wife. In: Chaucer’s Women. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378636_3
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