This essay examines two egregious moments in the Canterbury Tales at which Christian identity comes under scrutiny and attack from non-Christians: firstly, in the Jewish–Christian encounter of the Prioress's Tale, and secondly in the triptych of faith communities, of Christian Rome, Saracen Syria and pagan Northumbria, envisaged in the Man of Law's Tale. My title, referring to ‘absent religion’, does not simply suggest that Jews, Muslims and pagans were absent from Chaucer's London. Rather, ‘absent religion’ refers to the practice of non- Christian religion as represented in these stories, as ciphers of Christianity, within Chaucerian poetics, the larger project of the Canterbury Tales and Chaucerian criticism more generally. I am not primarily concerned with asking ‘What did the terms “Jew” and “Muslim” mean to medieval people?’ Instead, I am asking ‘What do the terms “Jew” and “Muslim” mean within the Canterbury Tales?’

There was not a recorded Muslim community in medieval London, and the city's Jews had been expelled, along with the rest of the Anglo-Jewish community, in 1290. However, we have long known that Jews, as well as Orthodox Christians from Asia Minor, Armenia and Russia, visited late-medieval England, and stayed there. Whilst largely Christian, late-medieval English cities like Bristol, London, Lynn and York were not exclusively ‘English’ in terms of inhabitants or in terms of culture. In London, one might have bought pilgrims’ travel guides to the Levant, or joined a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Rome, Walsingham or Wilsnack. One could buy furs too, traded through Novgorod, close to the pagan animists of the Baltic. Luxurious fabrics and clothing – damasks and tabbies or an acton jerkin, their very names attesting to an intimate connection with the Middle East – came to London brokers via Genoa, Lucca and Venice. Spices and sweets – cinnamon (from the Hebrew kinnamon), juleps (from the Persian gul-ab, rose-water), caraway, saffron and sesame (the Arabic karawiya, zafaran and simsim) – were brought to London from the East, changing both the tastes and language of the English. London was part of the spatial and symbolic infrastructure of an emerging pan-European economy, one of several lynchpins in the inter-city network trading between the Baltic, the Low Countries, France, the Mediterranean and beyond.