'The Living Witnesses of Our Redemption' : Martyrdom and Imitation in Chaucer's Prioress's Tale
- Author / Editor
- Patterson, Lee.
'The Living Witnesses of Our Redemption' : Martyrdom and Imitation in Chaucer's Prioress's Tale
- Published
- Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31: 507-60, 2001.
- Description
- The narrator of PrT desires to transcend the particularities of language and history, echoing patterns of medieval Jewish martyrdom connected to the "kiddush ha-Shem," which may have been known in Chaucer's England. Complex textual and historical intersections open the possibility of reading PrT not as an anti-Semitic tract but as a meditation on moral sophistication.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Prioress and Her Tale.
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.