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The Minster and the Privy: Rereading The Prioress's Tale

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Kathy Lavezzo
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Abstract

Introduced at the start of The Prioress's Tale but then dropped as an overt topic, usury nevertheless informs that anti-Semitic text. This essay situates Chaucer's narrative in the complex and contradictory history of medieval lending as a theory and a practice. I stress the architectural ironies of usury in the tale and in medieval English history. The tale demonizes Jewish usurers by associating them with the most abject of built environments, the latrine, and celebrates Christians through their links to the exalted space of the church. But, in a move that reflects the flow of capital throughout Christian society, the tale ultimately undermines the opposition of church and pit. Analyzed not as fixed entities but as contingent, fluid spaces joined through the usurious infrastructure of the tale, the minster and the privy suggest a materialist critique of efforts to conceive of a purely religious space.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 126 , Issue 2 , March 2011 , pp. 363 - 382
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2011

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