Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (52 page)

You Go, Figure; or, The Rape of a Trope

in the “Prioress’s Tale”

JACOB PRESS

My own inclination is to regard the case as a sexual crime against a child, of the kind unfortunately so prevalent today. Indeed, if anyone today read in the Sunday newspa- pers that the body of a child, dressed in jacket and shoes, had been found, with evi- dence of physical maltreatment, he would naturally assume that it was the work of a sexual criminal.

—V. D. Lipman,
The Jews of Medieval Norwich

The letter kills.

—2 Corinthians 3:6

The tale told by the Prioress in Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
is, on the literal level, the story of the vicious murder of a saintly Christian child by perverse Jews— no one has ever denied this. But there is more to this case than mere execution. While this child is undoubtedly a victim, we are called upon to query his “in- nocence”; while the story is undoubtedly of murder, it is also of rape. The boy saint here is a sexual subject and a sexual object; his characterization merges male-male erotics with a narrative of identity formation and cross-gender iden- tifi in a way that is available to be read not only as patently queer but as (anachronistically) “homosexual”; and the tale integrates all of the above into an allegory of Christian spiritual correctness and Judaic rhetorical transgression, a parable of semiotics as sex. While no part of this argument is self-evident, nei- ther does any of it lie far from the surface of Chaucer’s text.

The “Prioress’s Tale”—shorter than most others in Chaucer’s collection— is composed of thirty-four seven-line stanzas, presented as narrated by the outwardly pious but suspiciously carnal Prioress Eglentyne.
1
The first five stanzas are a “Prologue”; the remainder tell the story of the virtuous boy, his murder, his mother’s search for her missing child, the miracle of his living corpse, and the punishment of the Jews.

The five-stanza prologue is a remarkable meditation upon the relationship between a matriarchal Holy Family and language itself, the scene of a perpet- ual toggling process whereby the praise of the godhead leads quickly to praise of the maidenhead, who is, however, praised as an open corridor to the for- mer. The first stanza opens under the sign of the Father: “O Lord, oure Lord” (19), the Prioress exclaims, you are great because you are praised by all, from “men of dignitee” to “the mouth of children . . . on the brest soukinge” (22–24).
2
One might have thought that no act could be further removed from prayer than the unself-conscious and instinctive act of sucking at a mother’s breast—but divine communication apparently encompasses far more than the mere words of “men of dignitee.”

The Prioress opens the next stanza by declaring the necessary inadequacy of her attempt to tell a story of praise—now both of the “Lord”
and
his moth- er, “Which that thee bar” (“That gave birth to thee”; 28).
3
In this line the en- tity praised as “Lord” suddenly appears in his incarnation as Son, his physical dependence upon Mary stressed in disconcerting and significant proximity to the earlier image of infant sucking the breast and praising . . . the Lord? By the end of this stanza the possibility that the divine principle in the form of Mary may be subordinating other manifestations of Divinity is reflected on the grammatical level: “For she hirself is honour, and the rote / Of bountee, next hir sone” (32). Language can offer Mary nothing she does not already have, because Mary is the essence toward which language can merely gesture. That is, after her Son. We can’t forget about the Son.

In the very next line, the opening of stanza three, we gleefully forget about the Son, and the Virgin Mother reigns in glorious paradox as the divine in- carnation of both maternity and virginity. The Prioress proclaims in full voice and open throat: “O moder mayde! o mayde moder free!” (“O mother Maid- en, maiden Mother free!”).
4
And the following passage is key: as the Prioress proceeds to tell it, the Virgin’s virtue was so perfect as to provoke the reward of rape by the Holy Spirit.

[You] ravysedest doun fro the deitee,

Thurgh thyn humblesse, the goost that in th’alighte, Of whos vertu, whan he thyn herte lighte, Conceived was the Fadres sapience.

(38)

“Ravished down.” The opening verb here is itself an erotic oxymoron: the Vir- gin Mother is posited as the agent of her own violation. Here we have the par- adox of the willful effacement of will, the crime as the victim’s reward. The Prioress’s prologue presents a Christian antisubjectivity modeled on the mys-

tical erotics of a longed for paternal rape, with Mary as a permeable unself powerful enough to engineer her own virtuous violation. Mary’s active recep- tivity produces Christ—the word made flesh.
5

Before turning from the prologue to the tale itself, an extended outward turn, taking late fourteenth-century Christianity as our text, can buttress my argument, that the Father’s assault on Mary is here significantly parallel with the Jewish assault on the boy. I am not aware that any previous readers of this tale have been inclined “to call it rape,” to borrow a phrase from campus fem- inists. The following should demonstrate that, viewed in relation to the con- temporary valences of the terms it brings into circulation, it would be re- markable if the “Prioress’s Tale” were not one of sexual violence.

The widespread belief that organized Jewish communities would often sponsor the kidnapping, torture, and murder of young Christian boys as a form of religious observance is often invoked as evidence of the newly viru- lent persecutory orientation of twelfth-century Europe: this belief was un- precedented, but almost immediately endemic.
6
Exceptionally, given the na- ture of folklore, we know quite a bit about its origins. The first ritual murder allegation in medieval history emerges in Norwich in 1144, assiduously pro- moted by the cleric Thomas of Monmouth, especially in his
Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich
(ca. 1150), where Thomas reconstructs the scene of the murder with a narrative panache worthy of Ken Starr’s envy:

After the singing of the hymns appointed for the day in the synagogue, the chiefs of the Jews . . . suddenly seized hold of the boy William as he was having his dinner and in no fear of any treachery and ill-treated him in various horrible ways. For while some of them held him behind, oth- ers opened his mouth and introduced an instrument of torture which is called a teazle, and, fixing it by straps through both jaws to the back of his neck, they fastened it with a knot as tightly as it could be drawn. . . . Having shaved his head, they stabbed it with countless thorn-points, and made the blood come horribly from the wounds they made. . . . And thus, while these enemies of the Christian name were rioting in the spir- it of malignity round the boy, some of those present adjudged him to be fixed to a cross in mockery of the Lord’s passion. . . . They next laid their bloodstained hands upon the innocent victim, and, having lifted him from the ground and fastened him upon the cross, they vied with one an- other in their efforts to make an end of him.
7

Thomas should be credited as one of the few individuals in history to whom can be assigned the authorship of a narrative that became a myth. The major fram- ing elements of this tale became conventions of the ritual murder accusation in

its afterlife throughout the continent. Notable in this context are 1. the “inno- cent,” vulnerable nature of the boy as opposed to the “bloodstained hands” of the perpetrators; 2. the murder performed by several undifferentiated adult male Jews and the corporate responsibility of the entire Jewish people for the crime as a consequence of its formal, institutional sponsorship; 3. the murder preceded by the infl of pain upon the young male body through penetration (“while some of them held him behind, others opened his mouth and introduced an in- strument of torture”).

These elements are all present in a striking rendering of the martyrdom of William that has been found on the roodscreen of the village church of Lod- don, in East Anglia.
8
The barely clothed white body of the small boy William dominates the canvas, with three draped Jewish men hovering to the left, while on the right a fourth man holds a basin under the boy’s pierced side, catching the stream of blood that is pouring out. Thomas of Monmouth’s original description of this scene notes that William was not hung upon a cross but rather upon “a post set up between two other posts,” like an animal being roasted over a fire.
9
It is very difficult to visualize a crucifixion on such a piece of equipment: in this illustration the artist enables us to do so by por- traying the boy’s arms raised above his head, attached to the crossbeam, while his legs are splayed, with one affixed to each vertical pole. Thus the attempt to illustrate Thomas’s text produces the singular spectacle of a spread-eagle crucifixion. The artist’s crowning touch is a solid jet of flame upon which the boy’s bottom seems to be impaled: the flame rises up from the ground, reach- ing its terminus between the boy’s spread legs. As in Thomas’s text, the rood- screen renders ritual murder by suggesting ritual homosexual pederastic gang rape. The representation of ritual murder requires the spectacular display of the violated purity, the punctured membrane, of the innocent boy.

William was formally recognized as a sainted martyr in approximately 1150, and the narrative of ritual murder takes off upon an extraordinary ca- reer in the following decades. The murder of Christian children was attrib- uted to the Jews of Gloucester in 1168, the Jews of Bury St. Edmunds in 1181. Cases emerge in Bristol in 1183; in Winchester in 1192, 1225, and

1232; Bedford, 1202; London, 1244 and 1276. The Jews of Northhampton were accused of putting a Christian boy to death in 1277.
10
But the most fa- mous of these martyrdoms—and the one to which the “Prioress’s Tale”
11
al- ludes directly—was that of Little St. Hugh of Lincoln, recorded contempora- neously by Matthew Parris:

The Jews of Lincoln stole a boy called Hugh, who was about eight years old. After shutting him up in a secret chamber . . . they sent to almost all

the cities of England in which there were Jews, and summoned some of their sect from each city to be present at a sacrifice to take place at Lin- coln, in contumely and insult of Jesus Christ. . . . They scourged him till the blood flowed, they crowned him with thorns, mocked him, and spat upon him; each of them also pierced him with a knife, and they made him drink gall, and scoffed at him with blasphemous insults. . . . And after tormenting him in divers ways they crucified him, and pierced him to the heart with a spear. When the boy was dead, they took the body down from the cross, and for some reason disembowelled it; it is said for the purpose of their magic arts.
12

Thomas of Monmouth’s schema has already become rigidly conventional: the collective responsibility of the Jewish patriarchy (what much later becomes ar- ticulated as the “Elders of Zion”); the abasement of the pure; the penetration of the boy’s body, both by employing existing orifices and by creating new ones. While others believe the boy’s body was hollowed out for the purpose of “magic arts,” Parris reserves his own opinion.

Starting in the twelfth century, then, Christians believed that Jewish men ritually murder their boys. When called upon to evoke these murders, images of man-boy rape consistently crept into Christian accounts. From its very emergence the myth of Jewish ritual murder is already imbricated within the history of sodomy—the general term for grave sexual transgression that was itself coined by the Christian world only in the eleventh century.
13

It would be wise, at this point, to note what the term
sodomy
can and can- not do in this context. The work of the historian John Boswell succeeded in discrediting the blanket attribution of an extreme, static, and theologically based contraction of the range of sexual expression during the first millenni- um of the history of Christian Europe.
14
But even in Boswell’s work the late Middle Ages are marked off as a period during which a punitive discourse of sexual restriction, long latent within Christian theology, circulates with in- creasing frequency, urgency, and concern—under the name of sodomy. This term has never been unambiguously synonymous with homosexuality: as Jonathan Goldberg notes, sodomy has been known to mean “just about any- thing but unprotected vaginal intercourse between a married couple.”
15
Nor is it, today, the best conceptual tool for those who wish to explore the variety of early modern European sexual ideologies, some of which simply did not engage with the concerns generated by Christian theology.
16
Sodomy is, how- ever, exactly appropriate to this context. Alan Bray, in
Homosexuality in Re- naissance England
(1982), points out that medieval writers routinely and blithely grouped together such characters as werewolfs, sorcerers, heretics, and

“sodomites.”
17
A look at the most frequently cited medieval theologian of sodomy, St. Peter Damian, provides a vivid example of the convergence of the discursive terrain of the sodomite and the Jewish ritual murderer.

Indeed this vice is the death of bodies, the destruction of souls. . . . It evicts the Holy Spirit from the temple of the human heart; introduces the Devil who incites to lust. It casts into error; it completely removes the truth from the mind that has been deceived. . . . For it is this which vio- lates sobriety, kills modesty, strangles chastity and butchers irreparable virginity with the dagger of unclean contagion. It defiles everything, staining everything, polluting everything. And as for itself, it permits nothing pure, nothing clean, nothing other than filth.
18

Late medieval sodomy is “the vice” here—a demonic anti-Christian agency, a contaminating drive to depravity, personified as rapist and murderer.
19

Passages such as the above are useful reminders that Christian civilization in the Middle Ages was centrally concerned with the moral status of the body as a site of sexual pleasure. This is most evident in the rise of the cult of the Virgin Mother—one of the least predictable subplots in the history of theol- ogy. As one scholar wryly puts it: