Chaucer's Prioress: Piety, Vanity, and Contradiction

Introduction: A Paradoxical Nun

In Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Prioress's tale delves into the piety, propriety, and prejudice of a senior nun. Her tale examines the murder of a young, innocent choir boy who was killed by the town's Jews for singing aloud in praise of the Virgin Mary. Much attention is placed on the words and sentiments — especially the anti-Semitism — expressed by the Prioress in terms of assessing her character traits. Nevertheless, her social skills, dress, and physical appearance also reveal much about her character, particularly that she is a human being who strives to maintain piety and spirituality but remains subject to human desires and weaknesses (Stone 58).

In the General Prologue, the reader is afforded glimpses of the paradoxical nature of the Prioress's personality. She is a figure caught between the spiritual world she professes to inhabit and the aristocratic world she cannot seem to leave behind. This tension — between genuine devoutness and worldly vanity — is the central concern of any serious assessment of her character.

Social Ambitions and Aristocratic Affectations

She is quick to point out her proficiency in French (Chaucer 124) and her pristine table manners (Chaucer 128), two indications that she is quite sophisticated and desires to be accepted by the aristocracy. That she possesses such refinements is notable, but that she finds it necessary and appropriate to identify these as strong character traits directly evidences a lack of true piety, since genuine piety would manifest in a sincere interest in more spiritual matters (Murphy). Furthermore, she did not acquire her French in Paris but in a school in London — an additional indication that she is trying too hard to impress an aristocratic world to which she does not truly belong (Murphy).

It is important, however, to consider the view that the Prioress likely served as the head nun or assistant head of an abbey (Zatta). Her duties would have included managing the abbey's internal affairs and maintaining contact with the outside world (Zatta). She probably came from a prosperous — perhaps aristocratic — family with several daughters, making marriage unlikely, or from a fringe aristocratic family that could not afford to pay a proper dowry (Zatta). It stands to reason, within this worldview, that she would have possessed more material goods than might seem appropriate for a nun (Zatta). Therefore, to characterize her as merely ostentatious and materialistic risks losing sight of both the world she was born into and her role as the convent's link to secular society (Zatta).

Works Cited

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