Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (55 page)

/ Me thought she leyde a greyn upon my tongue” (“as soon as ever I began my song, / It seemed she laid a pearl upon my tongue”; 227–28). The boy will sing, must sing, “Til fro my tonge of taken is the greyn” (231). The “grayn” is unique to Chaucer’s version of this tale, and can mean either “pearl” or

“seed.” Most readers have been at a loss to account for it. For Hawkins, how- ever, there is no doubt: “No wisdom is worthy of the name of pearl save that which is known with a pure understanding—pure, firm, no way discordant with itself, all fleshly coverings of human similitudes and words laid by.”
63
Hawkins argues that the boy, at the end of the tale, is rewarded with a prop- erly masculine possession of the inner Christian truth that lurks behind the letter. But the image of the pearly drop here is consistent with the activities of this boy’s throat while he was in life: he has been rewarded for his extraordi- nary devotion to the Virgin not only by sexual violation but by impregnation with (the mother’s? the Jews’?) seed, placed in the raped yet miraculously in- tact throat of the little boy, by analogy once again with the Virgin Mary’s glo- rious encounter with the Holy Ghost. The pearl of truth is indeed contained within the body of the Christian sign.

Ultimately, the clergeon is a mere receptacle for the truth; it is not his pos- session. Acting upon the information he has received, “This holy monk, this abbot, him mene I, / His tongue out caughte and took a-wey the greyn” (“This saintly monk—by which I mean the abbot— / Pulled out his tongue, and took away the pearl”; 237), causing the boy to sink into silent death. Just as the plot of the first half of the tale teaches that the successfully gender- transgressive boy cannot be left in life, so the second half of the tale must reappropriate his extraordinary achievement into patriarchy. The holy, virtu- ous abbot inserts himself, too, into the boy’s mouth, but only so as to silence the clergeon once and for all. The abbot is suitably stricken by the gravity of his act.

His salte teres tirkled doun as reyn,

And gruf he fil al plat upon the grounde, And stile he lay as he had been y-bounde.

(239–42)

[With salt tears trickling down like rain, he fell Flat on his face upon the ground. Prostrate

He lay, as still as if chained to the spot.]

Penetration is followed by ejaculation, even though this is coitus interruptus. This is, perhaps, the boy’s greatest triumph yet—the representative of Chris- tian patriarchy is now down upon the ground before the clergeon. While the abbot may have reappropriated the gift of the virgin, he now lies flaccid and detumescent before the corpse, which is finally in the same state. The Jews vanished long ago, as suddenly as they appeared; it is this
tableau vivant
that is the definitive encounter of the tale: the corpse of the child confronts the

humbled man; Jesus and His Mother uncomfortably share the throne. The Prioress ends with a prayer that we all may be as privileged as the clergeon:

That, of his mercy, God so merciable On us his grete mercy multiplye,

For reverence of his moder Marye.

(254–56)

[That in his mercy mercifullest God May also multiply His boundless mercy

On us, in reverence of His mother Mary.]

With Mary’s help, may we all be as sanctified as the boy who, through his great piety, succeeded in embodying the sign and thus enjoyed the privilege of being raped by the Father. His life was brief but fabulous. “Amen.”

Notes

I thank Daniel Itzkovitz and an anonymous reader from Columbia University Press for their generous engagement with an earlier draft of this essay.

1. The Prioress is first presented in the “General Prologue” to the
   Canterbury Tales
   , lines 118–62.
   

2. Geoffrey Chaucer,
   A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer
   , vol. 2,
   The Canterbury Tales
   , part 20, “The Prioress’s Tale,” ed. Beverly Boyd (New York, 1987). All ci- tations of this work will be parenthetically noted by line number.
   

3. In the interest of accessibility, I append translations into modern English verse where appropriate. All translations are from Geoffrey Chaucer,
   The Canterbury Tales
   , trans. David Wright (New York, 1985), pp. 159–166.]
   

4. “O” is a singularly appropriate exclamation for a narrator concerned with openings and orifices, especially in light of the later valorization of the boy’s throat as a miraculous- ly open passageway in juxtaposition with the Virgin Mary’s own miraculous body. The ex- clamation “O” appears in the Prioress’s tale and prologue roughly twice as frequently as in any other of the
   Canterbury Tales
   , an average of once every 21 lines. The tales with the next highest frequency of “O”s do not even approach this figure: the cry appears in the Manci- ple’s introduction and tale with an average frequency of once every 40 lines, in the Man of Law’s tale and epilogue with an average frequency of once every 44 lines, and in all other tales with decreasing frequency. See “O,” in Larry D. Benson,
   A Glossarial Concordance to the Riverside Chaucer
   (New York, 1993), 1:615–617. I owe this observation to Denise Ful- brook.
   

5. See similar reflections in Richard Rambuss, “Devotion and Defilement: The Blessed Virgin Mary and the Corporeal Hagiographics of Chaucer’s
   Prioress’s Tale,
   ” in
   Textual Bod- ies: Changing Boundaries of Literary Representation
   , ed. Lori Hope Lefkovitz (Albany, N.Y., 1997).
   

   On the particular appropriateness of the term
   mystical
   in this context, consider the most influential mystic of Chaucer’s day, the anchoress and theologian Julian of Norwich.
   

   See Julian of Norwich,
   The Revelations of Divine Love of Julian of Norwich
   (New York, 1961), trans. James Walsh; also Jay Ruud, “‘I wolde for thy love dye’: Julian, Romance Dis- course, and the Masculine,” in
   Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays
   , ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York, 1998).
   

6. Histories of this myth often cite two accusations against the Jews in antiquity as in- fluences on the medieval charges. Gavin Langmuir makes a convincing case that these inci- dents were not generally known. Gavin Langmuir, “Thomas of Monmouth,” in
   The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore
   , ed. Alan Dundes (Madison, 1991), 12.
   

7. Thomas of Monmouth,
   The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich
   (1896), trans. and ed. Augustus Jessopp and M. R. James, cited in M. D. Anderson,
   A Saint at Stake: The Strange Death of William of Norwich 1144
   (London, 1964), 77–78.
   

8. See J. Charles Cox,
   Norfolk
   (London, 1911), 2:47.
   

9. Ibid.
   

10. The belief in ritual murder spread far beyond the borders of England. Folklorists have recorded a French ballad on the theme of Hugh’s, composed only a few years after the event. See F. Michel,
    Hugues de Lincoln
    (Paris, 1834), ix–64; trans. in A. Hume,
    Sir Hugh of Lincoln; or, An Examination of a Curious Tradition respecting the Jews, with a notice of the popular Poetry connected with it
    (London, 1849). In 1171 thirty-one Jews were burned at Blois on charges of ritual murder. At Fulda, in Hesse-Nassau, thirty-four Jews were killed by Crusaders in 1235 in retribution for the murder of five children. In 1285 ninety Jews of Munich were executed upon similar charges; the following year forty Jews in Oberwe- sel were killed. The charge appeared in Spain, near Toledo, in 1490, in Hungary, at Tyr- nau and Bazin, in 1494 and 1529, and continues to surface periodically up to the current era. By the thirteenth century these accusations almost always stressed the Jewish need for Christian blood, an element already visible in the Lodden roodscreen but absent from Thomas’s written account as well as the very first accusations. See Hermann L. Strack, “Blood Accusation,”
    The Jewish Encyclopedia
    (New York, 1906), 3:261–267; Yehuda Slut- sky, “Blood Libel,”
    Encyclopaedia Judaica
    (New York, 1971), 4:1119–1131; Zefira Entin Rokeach, “The State, the Church, and the Jews in Medieval England,” in
    Antisemitism Through the Ages
    , ed. Shmuel Almog, trans. Nathan H. Reisner (New York, 1988), 104–111. In a significant variation a consecrated host is purchased and then abused by Jews in the fifteenth-century Croxton Play of the Sacrament. See
    Medieval Drama
    , ed. David Bevington (Boston, 1975), 754–788.
    

11. “O yonge Hugh of Lincoln, slayn also / With cursed Jewes, as it is notable” (lines 250–51).
    

12. Matthew Parris,
    Historia Major
    , trans. and cited in Joseph Jacobs, “Little St. Hugh of Lincoln: Researches in History, Archaeology, and Legend,” in Dundes,
    Blood Libel
    , 45–46.
    

13. “‘Sodomy’ is a medieval artifact. I have found no trace of the term before the eleventh century,” asserts Mark D. Jordan, in
    The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology
    (Chicago, 1997), 1. Beware the concluding passage of this otherwise useful book, in which Jordan selectively traces those aspects of the Church’s tradition he finds distasteful back to their non-Christian origin: “Consider that the origin of the misinterpretation of [the Bib- lical story of the destruction of ] Sodom [as an antisodomitical cautionary tale] lies . . . in the intratestimental contact of Jews with Hellenistic society; that the Pauline condemna- tions [of male-male eroticism] derive from pagan philosophic sources or from the preju- dices of certain Jewish communities” (173). It is interesting to ponder what, exactly, would
    

    be left of early “Christianity” if one must discount as somehow inauthentic all elements that have their sources in Hellenistic Judaism and pagan philosophy.
    

14. See John Boswell,
    Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century
    (Chicago, 1980), and
    Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe
    (New York, 1994).
    

15. Jonathan Goldberg, “Introduction,”
    Queering the Renaissance
    (Durham, N.C., 1994), 13.
    

16. See especially Valerie Traub,
    Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shake- spearean Drama
    (New York, 1992); and Mario DiGangi,
    The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama
    (New York, 1997).
    

17. Alan Bray, “Introduction,”
    Homosexuality in Renaissance England
    , with new after- word (London, 1982), 7–11. It would be inappropriate to cite Bray without noting Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s extraordinarily productive revisions of his thesis in
    Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire
    (New York, 1985).
    

18. Peter Damian,
    Liber Gomorrhianus
    , cited and translated in Jeffrey Richard,
    Sex, Dis- sidence, and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages
    (New York, 1990), 140.
    Liber Gomorrhianus
    was composed from 1048 to 1054. While Damian’s positions were un- doubtedly extreme for his day, they were ultimately to become definitive Christian doctrine.
    

19. The modern locus classicus for this almost vampiric conception of sodomy, where the active homosexual personifies evil and preys on innocent young children, can be found in the message of Anita Bryant: Christian children are being sodomized.
    

20. Mary Clayton,
    The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England
    (New York, 1990), 3, 4.
    

21. Ibid., 5.
    

22. Hygeburg,
    Vita SS Willibaldi et Wynnebaldi
    , trans. and cited in Charles H. Talbot,
    The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany
    (New York, 1954), 166, cited in Clayton,
    The Cult of the Virgin Mary
    , 19.
    

23. See Rambuss, “Devotion”; Robert Worth Frank Jr., “Miracles of the Virgin, Me- dieval Anti-Semitism, and the ‘Prioress’s Tale,’” in
    The Wisdom of Poetry
    , ed. Larry D. Ben- son, Siegfried Wenzel (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1982), 177–188;
    The Middle English Miracles of the Virgin
    , ed. Beverly Boyd (San Marino, Cal., 1964), 33–49.
    

24. Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, “Saints and Sex, ca. 500–1100: Striding Down the Net- tled Path of Life,” in
    Sex in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays
    , ed. Joyce E. Salisbury (New York, 1991), 214.
    

25. Hrostvitha, trans. and cited in Christopher St. John,
    The Plays of Roswitha
    (Lon- don, 1923), xxvi–xxvii, cited in Marina Warner,
    Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary
    (New York, 1976), 70.
    

26. In
    The Jew as Ally of the Muslim
    (Notre Dame, Ind., 1986), Allen and Helen Cutler argue that medieval anti-Judaism was “primarily a function of medieval anti-Muslimism” (114). On the conflation of antisemitic and anti-Muslim sentiment, see also Jeffrey Richards,
    Sex, Dissidence
    : “The change in attitude came about in the eleventh century. . . . Anti-Jewish feeling built up at the same time as anti-Islamic feeling did. . . . In 1063 knights heading for Spain to participate in the advance of the Christian kingdoms against the Moslems attacked several Jewish communities en route. . . . Then in the wake of the cru- sade proclaimed by Pope Urban II . . . an atmosphere of religious hysteria was engendered by wandering preachers in which the promotion of the crusade was accompanied in some areas by massacres of the Jews” (90–91).
    

27. Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: A Florilegium of her Works
    , trans. with an introduction, in- terpretive essay, and notes, Katharina M. Wilson (Rochester, N.Y., 1998), 36.
    

28. Ibid.
    

29. Pelagius was a historical figure, a thirteen-year-old Christian boy taken prisoner by the Cordoban Caliph ‘Abd al-Rahmân III in 925 or 926. Upon refusing the caliph’s offer to join his household, Pelagius was tortured and killed. Jordan,
    The Invention of Sodomy
    , 10–28.
    

30. The similarities between Hrotsvitha’s rendering of the story of Pelagius and Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale” are remarkable: in both cases, demonic non-Christians sex- ually assault and martyr Christian males notable for their youth and purity, as narrated with extreme pathos by female clerics of great self-professed piety. Textual evidence would seem to rule out the possibility of specific influence. Hrotsvitha died around 973, in a Saxon monastery, and her works appear to have remained completely unknown until 1494; Chaucer probably composed the
    Canterbury Tales
    between 1385 and 1390, in Eng- land. See
    Hroswitha of Gandersheim: Her Life, Times, and Works, and a Comprehensive Bib- liography
    , ed. Anne Lyon Haight (New York, 1965); Wilson,
    Hrotsvit of Gandersheim
    .
    

    It should also be noted that in recent scholarship it is more common to encounter ex- amples of medieval feminization of the figure of the Jew, which was undoubtedly often the case. See, however, Willis Johnson, “The Myth of Jewish Male Menses,”
    Journal of Medieval History
    24.3 (1998): 273–295, for the debunking of one often cited scholarly misconception.
    

31. On the epistemology of childhood purity in the modern era, see James Kincaid’s
    

    Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture
    (New York, 1992).
    

32. Arustuppus cited in Lloyd de Mause, “The Evolution of Childhood,” in
    The His- tory of Childhood
    (New York, 1974), 26.