Introduction: What We Think About When We Think About the Prioress’s Tale

I thank Shoshona Adler, Maija Birenbaum, Usha Vishnuvajjala, and Stuart Weinstock for providing vital support and astute editorial advice while I was drafting this introduction. I am deeply grateful to Karla Taylor and the editors of The Chaucer Review for their patient encouragement and insightful collaboration through every stage of this project.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 between a medieval then and a contemporary now. The Prioress's Tale holds up a mirror that questions our visions of difference and distance in many forms—historical, religious, cultural, racial, geographic, and narrative—and it also challenges us to rethink the discomfiture of indifference. No Canterbury tale offers a more opportune venue to engage today's urgent ethical challenge: to build alliances and enact solidarity across distinct marginalized positions even as long-standing bigotries tighten their grip on our world. The following articles accept this challenge by addressing three imbricated priorities: to discern responses to the Prioress's Tale by historical readers; to read and teach the tale ethically now; and to appreciate the intellectual lessons that emerge from our efforts to forge relationships between such moments. We invite readers to rethink the literal and figurative distances that often excuse antisemitism and to disavow all anti-Judaism along with related forms of bigotry. Facing painful histories with present exigencies in mind may not solve current political problems, but ignoring them squanders opportunities to forge alliances that could challenge white Christian supremacy and other structural racism.Around the turn of the twenty-first century, Sheila Delany urged Chaucerians to rethink the significance of the Prioress's Tale's Asian setting, which previous scholars had interpreted chiefly as a reflection of England.2 Blurton and Johnson focus evocatively on the tale's twin forces of misogyny and antisemitism, largely leaving aside questions of setting and racial antisemitism. Delany promises a "really Jewish reading of Asia," and delivers it by taking the story's explicit (if underdeveloped) orientalism seriously enough to excavate Asia's social and cultural history on its own terms: the "Jewish and Islamic facts" of medieval Asia.3 Seeing that the tale's Christians would be Arab Christians, she marks the geographic and cultural limits of medieval English antisemitism by recognizing coexistence between Muslims and Jews, whose relative inclusion in medieval Islamicate society contrasted significantly with the precarity of Jewish life in Latin Christendom.Delany wrote before David Nirenberg's 2013 Anti-Judaism: the Western Tradition, which expands conventional "Western" parameters to include and examine the Mediterranean world's largely Christian and Muslim thinking "with and about Judaism, and how that thinking affected (and was affected by) the possibilities of existence for Judaism in the world."4 Nirenberg situates European anti-Semitism within a capacious Western structure of anti-Judaism—the habitually hostile practice of using the figure of the Jew to understand the world—explaining that "anti-Semitism . . . captures only a small portion, historically and conceptually, of" anti-Judaism.5 Delany similarly evokes for Chaucerians a wide range of attitudes toward Jews and Judaism, with the nuanced possibilities for Jewish life and coexistence that distinguish historical realities experienced across Christian and Islamicate societies. Neither contradicting nor citing Nirenberg, and with different emphases, Steven Kruger distinguishes between "anti-Judaism" operating via Christian supersessionist approaches to devotion, doctrine, and theology before the First Crusade (1096) and a later medieval European "anti-Semitism" that dehumanizes Jews with characteristically irrational hatred.6 Anthony Bale also registers this irrationality. However, he eschews the "anti-critical, ahistorical and totalizing" term because it supposes an unavoidable, static transhistorical reality that dismisses historical meaning, records instead "lazy history," and finally obfuscates connections between intellectual awareness and emotional awareness, disguising current political dynamics.7 Elucidating both terms, Suzanne Conklin Akbari describes "anti-Judaism" as a "theological discourse of Jewish alterity" that rejects Jews, body and soul, and shades into a distinctly racializing "antisemitism" as it focuses on bodily diversity. Crucially, Akbari discovers that medieval orientalism ostracizes Muslims through similar tropes of both religious orientation and bodily diversity expressly by studying anti-Judaism's machinations.8Rival histories riddled with terms, many in tension with each other, inform our current proclivities for solidarity or strife; indeed, the same terms can work carefully in one context, yet distract recklessly from potential alliances in another. As Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek Penslar note, "representations of the Jews have always been at the very center of orientalist discourse," while "anti-Semitism" (or "antisemitism") develops alongside modern colonialism as a specific linguistic and racial form of orientalism popularized by Ernst Renan.9 Kalmar and Penslar see antisemitism as an orientalist subgenre and observe that the Palestinian Christian critic Edward Said himself "called orientalism the 'Islamic branch' of anti-Semitism," thus classifying it as an Islamophobic subgenre within a larger western antisemitic project.10 Nirenberg, however, labels antisemitism a kind of anti-Judaism. Their taxonomies conflict, yet Nirenberg's Anti-Judaism and Said's Orientalism show where "Western" intellectual history reflects particular desires and self-conceptions rather than historical truths about Jews or Muslims.11As Nirenberg demonstrates, theories and taxonomies influence what we can learn. They also affect how we build alliances across marginalized positions and identities. Kalmar and Penslar argue that Western Christianity's long-standing "politico-theological" desires "to understand and to manage its relations with both of its monotheistic Others" shape orientalism at least as much as "modern" imperialism does, and they insist that "recognizing the Christian foundations of orientalism is an intellectual necessity, dictated by the facts."12 On facts, Nirenberg reconsiders the thinking of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer: that the historical conditions that allowed the Shoah to happen were based not on "reality" or facts, but instead on an inability to understand facts; indeed, when there is a gap between reality and what most people can understand about reality, hatred often fills it.13 Similarly, as Geraldine Heng explicates in The Invention of Race, humans invent race and racism to disguise our systematic failure to understand or accept true ambiguities of identity and deep associations across would-be lines of difference.14 These scholars represent what we might learn when we study facts, theories, and bigotries inclusively, whether in the intellectual gaps where catastrophic hate festers or where racists strategically deploy racism to reap material and political benefits. Akbari's work demonstrates what Kalmar and Penslar urge: to "understand orientalism, we must read discourses about Muslims and Jews together, however embarrassing or disturbing the task may be politically, religiously, or emotionally."15 To make ethical meaning in these spaces, the following articles loosen their grip on Chaucer's authorial responsibility and face critical responsibility to explain how our own intellectual positions and ethical judgments inform our political stances and alliances.This exquisite yet discomfiting moment closes Said's introduction to Orientalism with a consideration of the tensions, whether productive or distracting, between critical responsibility and critical subjectivity. Said writes:Forty-five years on, both the global threat of antisemitism and the raw ironies of oppression that weigh on Arab Palestinians are deadlier and more tangible than ever. Our issue cannot solve either problem, but it confronts some tensions that dissuade us from trying.Although I recommend no definitive taxonomy, I resort to Nirenberg's clarifying categorization where not following the authors' preferences. We offer these articles as encouragement to rethink the painful histories of antisemitism, whether ignorant and irrational or all too rationalized and racialized through strategic calculation, together with other cultural and political discourses like anti-Judaism, orientalism, Islamophobia, and white supremacy. This introduction centers on Nirenberg's Anti-Judaism for three key reasons. First, his project illuminates Delany's geopolitically and geoculturally accurate "Asia" as an avenue for opening Chaucer studies to the insights of the multidisciplinary, global field of Jewish studies, just as globalizing our critical perspectives becomes more urgent than ever.17 Second, Nirenberg's project, an epic think-piece, models how to challenge bigotry without distorting the nuanced politics of this intellectual history. As I have argued elsewhere, we disengage the problems of the intellectual, the political, and the ethical only at the risk of missing Middle English literary culture's ingenuity.18 The point of their confluence focuses this issue.Hence my third reason: together, Delany and Nirenberg define the ethical location of the Prioress's Tale now. It is winter 2023–24. The Islamic fundamentalist Hamas regime and the Israel's current Jewish fundamentalist government are waging a war that has already killed around 25,000 humans from Asia's Levantine communities at a historically staggering pace, to say nothing of the toll on planet earth, where anti-Judaism mushrooms in every direction.19 The siege of Gaza also threatens to eradicate entire families with starvation and disease. Joanna Bellis's article opens our collection by pondering the Siege of Jerusalem's "fascination with human behavior in extremity" (siege warfare, hunger, infanticide, cannibalism) and the ironic "sympathies entwined around the condemnation of the Jews." Karen Winstead closes it by establishing Chaucer's Prioress's Tale as both a virulent antisemitic "hate narrative" and a Middle English example of "a living genre that is indeed a live grenade, ready to be lobbed at the despised group du jour." The tale is also an episode of Jews, Christians, and Muslims together living, dying, and threatening the potential for future coexistence with merciless vengeance on a densely populated urban Asian terrain, beyond European Christian society. It feels impossible to address this moment fully or aptly, yet it would be irresponsible to evade it. As our contributors demonstrate, studying and teaching such material now is exactly how universities must move beyond lurid slogans and stances to build political understanding, empathy, and alliances across hostile positions.20The articles in this special issue of The Chaucer Review engage matters of setting and conversion, as their authors face the geopolitical stakes of reading the Prioress's Tale. Karla Taylor's "Afterword: The Form of the Reader," contextualizes the deep intellectual and communal stakes of violent sociopolitical exclusion in a literary process epitomized by the Canterbury Tales's method of "distributed authorship." Taylor shows how the discomfiting, human tensions that give the Tales its form simultaneously render it a perpetually useful tool for ethical inquiry.Diving into the tale's manuscript tradition to survey scribal marginalia and textual variants, Joanna Bellis finds that its "self-sabotaging frame" does not lead scribes to condemn it, although local condemnations admit deeper antisemitism than editions do. Bellis's "Manuscript Readings We Don't Think About in the Prioress's Tale" explains "that the value the past holds for us is deeper and stranger than is allowed for by the single axis of moral exoneration or condemnation; yet we weaken or compromise or discard that axis at our own peril" for responsible reading requires considerable nuance. Pondering Delany's "Asia," Bellis notes that when the Asian setting disappears from some manuscripts, affirming an English or European setting, tolerance emerges as "bad piety." She deepens connections with the Siege of Jerusalem to imagine Jerusalem itself as the setting's great Asian city. Here, "Jerusalem's fall became an intertext, perhaps even a model for the zero-tolerance total razing" of "the whole community, including its children." Thus, Bellis reveals how setting might excuse or intensify human responsibility for genocidal violence.J. R. Mattison's "The Prioress's Tale and La France juive: Chaucer in Nineteenth-Century French Antisemitism" discovers a late-nineteenth-century French translation within Ếdouard Drumont's outrageously popular 1886 antisemitic manifesto. Mattison uses "antisemitism" rather than "anti-Semitism" precisely to reject the racist "Semite" category, echoing Kruger. She reminds us that "While Ernst Renan popularized the racialized notions of 'Semites' and 'Aryans,' Drumont adopted Renan's thinking to create a rabid racial antisemitism." Here, antisemitism describes conflating and misunderstanding the unique implications of "myths about Jews murdering Christians," whereas anti-Judaism demands understanding "eruptions of antisemitic violence within their particular political, social, and cultural context," and confirmation bias fuels "irrational" antisemitic history which defies logic "and instead works through affect." Mattison argues that Drumont's translation retains the Asian setting while discarding other framing details to highlight "a Jewish-Christian binary" that largely ignores Islam and implies a "global Jewish threat to Christian children." His use of "Semite" conflates "race and religion," isolating Jews as an intolerable "nation" that is equally unassimilable in Asia, medieval England, and contemporary France.Samantha Katz Seal's "'Ycomen of Cristen blood': Racializing Christianity in Chaucer's Prioress's Tale" contextualizes the Prioress's reference to Christianity as a blood race within the entire Canterbury Tales. Illuminating "Christian racialization in progress," Seal notes inconsistencies that contradict Chaucer's racialization of Judaism and Islam by framing Christian race as uniquely requiring both lineage and spiritual confirmation. Such inconsistencies subvert the Prioress's Tale's rare depiction of Christianity as a fully hereditary race. Neither "antisemitism" or "anti-Semitism" appears here, but Seal powerfully defines anti-Judaism "as a mode of Christian self-definition" that constructs Jewishness as hierarchically inferior to Christianness. The Prioress enshrines Asia as a locus of sterile martyrdom, "a model of sacrifice represented by its murdered children," and survived only by celibate clergy whereas a purified England anticipates continuity. The tale finally collapses on itself, unable to annihilate any community so much as the Christian community itself.Leila K. Norako's "Reading the Prioress's Tale as Recovery Romance, or The Tale of a Prioress, a Sniper, and the Cross-Temporal Weaponization of Empathy" describes "recovery romance" as a subgenre of Islamophobic crusade romance that intensifies antisemitism through the weaponization of empathy. While Chaucer weaponizes empathy against Jews, Clint Eastwood's American Sniper (2014) weaponizes empathy against Iraqi Muslims, illuminating how emotion restructures intellectual and ethical priorities. Norako chooses "antisemitism" to emphasize Chaucer's "absolutist antisemitism" and the political and temporal continuity of anti-Jewish hatred. Here, Delany's "Asia" figures as the ultimate "aspirational" locus for recovering Christian supremacy.While Norako considers Christian supremacy, Anna Wilson scrutinizes racial white supremacy in "Whiteness, Innocence, and Childhood in the Prioress's Tale and Its Devotional Milieu," where childhood is "a cultural analytic," akin to gender and race, that constructs political whiteness.21 The Asian setting suggests that none of these characters would appear white if compared with the Canterbury pilgrims, yet Wilson employs critical race theory to reveal that the Christian choirboy and his mother are politically white and symbolically identified "with western European Christians, without erasing their Asianness." Wilson uses "antisemitic" to signify whiteness's race-making designs on Jewishness; however, two instances of "anti-Jewish" denote broad trends in devotional literature and English policy.Seal, Norako, and Wilson ponder conversion, which the Prioress's Tale entangles with genocide. Reading the Man of Law's Tale, Seal finds that, for Chaucer and his contemporaries, European pagans prove easier to convert and of higher status than Muslim and Jewish converts because "European pagans" may enter Christian bloodlines, but Asian Jews and Syrian Muslims may not, even after their baptismal conversions. While Seal observes that conversion may save Muslim souls, "but their bodies must be hacked to bits to keep Christian bodies . . . safe from racial taint," Norako identifies a spectrum of convertability stretching from Asian Mongol pagans to Muslims to Jews. The little choirboy spreads his faith to Asia, yet its Jews are those "least likely to convert" and with whom there can be no peaceful coexistence. They deserve collective punishment, which manifests on the page as "large-scale violence in response to the perceived impossibility of realizing genocidal victories off the page." Seal and Norako observe that Muslims and Jews represent stubborn problems to Christian evangelism. Meanwhile, Wilson notes that women and children like the choirboy pass too easily between racial and ethno-religious categories and thus "raise anxieties over whether childish innocence of Christian ritual, liturgy, and language . . . might blur into non-Christian ignorance to threaten a Christian supremacist future" and identity.Wilson reads the Prioress's Tale as a conversion fantasy where Christianity "must be . . . inculcated . . . through . . . education and discipline." Whereas Seal investigates conversion vis-à-vis birth and baptism of non-Christians, Wilson illuminates early childhood indoctrination that renders all Christians politically and culturally white regardless of location or phenotype. The "dangerous instability" of the white Christian "boy-child" signals, in Wilson's reading, "anxieties around Christian futurity" that "must be fixed" even "through death" if death will stabilize "Christian identity." Both Wilson and Seal identify Christian martyrdom as the inevitable result of Christian thirst for racial cleansing, while Norako instead identifies a Christian fantasy of zero-tolerance Jewish annihilation. Where Seal observes the tale's sterile ending, Norako sees Asia recovered for Christians, and Wilson argues that "martyrdom ultimately transmutes individual instability into communal Christian stability" for the once mixed "urban polity." The Christian community inside the tale merges with "a defensively-oriented Christian community" that embraces English Christians outside the tale. This multi-dimensional tale substantiates such nuanced readings, yet death and collective punishment loom across these analyses, as if conversion were a process better not survived in the tale's imagination.Karen Winstead's "Thinking About (and With) the Prioress's Tale: From Medieval Alterity to Modern Hate Narrative" traces her progression from taking this Canterbury tale as the most alien to seeing it as the most relevant twenty-first-century tale. Winstead reflects on the Prioress's Tale through reference to Angus Fletcher's Wonderworks and James Simpson's four-pronged categorization of literature as Stranger, Lover, Friend, and Toxin, remembering that universities must teach sustained critical analysis to distinguish facts from tropes, news from disinformation.22 Winstead teaches that "Understanding how toxic literature works . . . empowers us" to challenge "literature that has itself been weaponized" and ultimately to build a more ethical world.In offering an example of how Chaucerian antisemitic hate narrative's tropes have been repurposed against a geographically, linguistically, temporally distinct group, Winstead conjures the image and name: "border-crossers." Surveying Donald Trump's political speeches, she finds hate narrative deployed against immigrant refugees, whom he dubs "border-crossers" and whose stories he twists to "heighten the pathos of his narration through heart-wrenching descriptions of parental agony." The image of North American border-crossers ironically summons the eth-nonym Hebrew, which appears in the Prioress's Tale as "Hebrayk peple" (VII 560). Hebrews, or Ivrim (עברים), from the root abr (עבר), suggests crossing over from elsewhere, hence "border-crossers" in Hebrew. Hate narrative plots to justify violence, ghettoization, and the demonization of border-crossers. We must understand such narrative machinations well enough to cross borders anyway, and perhaps even to read as twenty-first-century intellectual and empathetic Ivrim: crossing borders to build alliances and to find solidarity beyond the forbidden pale. We might also reclaim the ethnonym Arab (عرب), "Arab," meaning literally a people on the move, never stagnant. Might we learn and write ethics by moving like Arabs: refusing to be fixed in our own bigotries or in anyone's death? Contemplating Norako's and Koritha Mitchell's work, Winstead suggests that while some are reluctant "to connect the experiences of disparate marginalized groups" to avoid producing lazy history or fueling the persecution of another group, "identifying the commonalities" carefully can illuminate violence's objectives. May we reject violence and its objectives to embrace our fellow humans in an ethical community that defends all this earth's peoples.