England's Dead Boys: Telling Tales of Christian-Jewish Relations before and After the First European Expulsion of the Jews.
- Author / Editor
- Heng, Geraldine.
England's Dead Boys: Telling Tales of Christian-Jewish Relations before and After the First European Expulsion of the Jews.
- Published
- Modern Language Notes 127, supplement (2012): S54-85.
- Description
- Compares several late-medieval boy-murder narratives to assess attitudes toward Jews before and after their 1290 expulsion from England. Chaucer's PrT is the "finest aesthetic treatment" of the story in the Middle Ages and, in comparison with other versions, it has relatively little emphasis on filth and desecration. Importantly, the tale makes a "remarkable contribution" to the "racialization of England," representing genealogical, spatial, and pedagogical aspects of defining Christians by contrast with Jews.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Prioress and Her Tale