Whiteness, Innocence, and Childhood in the Prioress’s Tale and Its Devotional Milieu

ABSTRACT This article draws on recent scholarship in premodern critical race theory and the history of childhood to argue that in the Prioress’s Tale, whiteness signifies innocence and describes innocent bodies. In the tale, the color white gains its meaning from its contexts in devotional and antisemitic literature in which it evokes milk and breastfeeding, which in turn evokes a complex set of ideas about heredity and learned culture. By referencing this tangle of meanings around whiteness, the Prioress’s Tale resituates Christian anxieties about the nature and value of childish innocence into the genre of the antisemitic miracle, whose primary anxieties are focused on the coherence of the Christian body and the Christian community. When the “white metaphors” of devotional literature move into an explicitly racial and racializing genre, they become part of race-making discourses of white Christianity or Christian whiteness.