The suspicion of non-Christians seeking baptism that begins to emerge in the Becket legend and Bevis of Hampton, among other late medieval English works, is accentuated in Geoffrey Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale. In Chaucer's retelling of the story of the pure, exiled Christian princess Constance, non-Christians such as the Sultaness, the Sultan of Syria's mother, feign the desire to convert the better to entrap their Christian victims.

The stark treatment of non-Christians in The Man of Law's Tale and the narrative's dismissal of baptism as a life-altering ritual are rendered even more meaningful by the knowledge that Chaucer knew the Becket legend. To emphasize the connection between the two texts, the first section of this chapter stresses the varied ways in which The Man of Law's Tale both echoes and responds to the legend about Becket's non-Christian mother. Having made this argument, I examine the portrayal and function of conversion in The Man of Law's Tale, highlighting the similarities in the two narratives. In this second part of the chapter, I look particularly at how the two tales differentiate between the Other and the familiar while also signaling an important shift in the thematic treatment of conversion in Chaucer's tale.

The Becket Legend and The Man of Law's Tale

The connection between the Becket legend and Geoffrey Chaucer's The Man of Law's Tale was first established over eighty years ago by Paul Alonzo Brown. In his 1930 study, The Development of the Legend of Thomas Becket, Brown emphasized the influence of the Saracen princess motif on the legend. More recently, Lawrence Warner has convincingly argued that the legend provides both an etiological origin for the Order of St. Thomas of Acre—giving Becket a non-Christian mother so as to explain his association with Acre—and a secondary source for Chaucer's retelling of the Constance narrative. However, neither Brown nor Warner have analyzed the extent to which Chaucer is responding to and retelling the story of Thomas Becket's mother. Nor does either author consider what a juxtaposition of the legend with The Man of Law's Tale might reveal about the latter, particularly when considering the place of conversion in these and other fourteenth-century English narratives.