Disparate Echoes of the Virgin Mary in Chaucer's Prioress's Tale and Second Nun's Tale

In the course of Chaucer’s examination of his contemporary institutional Church, one of the projects he undertakes in The Canterbury Tales, he uses the characters of the Prioress and the Second Nun to dissect one of the most prevalent forms of worship promulgated by the Church: Marian devotion, or the practice of revering the Blessed Virgin Mary as the Mother of God. Throughout their respective prologues and tales, both women invoke the Virgin Mary as the muse and guiding light of their words, and present characters who allegorically echo her, but the implications of these representations diverge significantly and offer two distinct ways of understanding the Virgin Mary in medieval Mariology. The Prioress’s Tale’s treatment of the Virgin Mary in conjunction with Jewish-Christian relations uses her as an inflexible figure demanding unconditional, unexplained devotion on pain of death, both spiritual and literal. In contrast, in The Second Nun’s Tale, the Virgin Mary—both as her own character and as allegorically represented by St. Cecelia and the Second Nun herself—is the universal translator and transformer, bringing about a new Christian community without the violent demise of another. In this paper I argue primarily that Chaucer utilizes these characters and their tales to point out the anti-Semitic hypocrisy in certain strains of Marian devotion, as well as proposing a more authentically Christian alternative. I also argue that within the broader context of the Tales, these characters’ negotiation of Marian theology enters into a more serious conversation concerning the pilgrimage itself. The Prioress’s and the Second Nun’s tales both comment on the formation of groups of Christians united by some common force. The disparate ways in which these groups form force the rest of the pilgrimage, and the reader who follows along with them, to examine what exactly holds them together as a group: a shared animosity for those who they perceive as ‘outsiders’ or a shared, edifying faith?