Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Essays
- 1 Violencia en tres cuentos hagiográficos de la España medieval
- Physical Impairment in the First Surgical Handbooks Printed in Germany
- Serious Elements in Medieval French Farces: A New Dimension
- Narrative Afterlife and the Treatment of Time in Henryson's Testament of Cresseid
- Euclid in Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae and Some of its English Translations
- Seeking the Medieval in Shakespeare: The Order of the Garter and the Topos of Derisive Chivalry
- A Revelation of Purgatory and Chaucer's Prioress
- Eyeglasses for the Blind: Redundant Therapies in Meschinot and Villon
- Jean de Meun in the Cité des Dames: Author versus Authority
- The Festival Context of Villon's Pet au Deable: Martinmas in Late-Medieval Paris
A Revelation of Purgatory and Chaucer's Prioress
from Essays
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Essays
- 1 Violencia en tres cuentos hagiográficos de la España medieval
- Physical Impairment in the First Surgical Handbooks Printed in Germany
- Serious Elements in Medieval French Farces: A New Dimension
- Narrative Afterlife and the Treatment of Time in Henryson's Testament of Cresseid
- Euclid in Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae and Some of its English Translations
- Seeking the Medieval in Shakespeare: The Order of the Garter and the Topos of Derisive Chivalry
- A Revelation of Purgatory and Chaucer's Prioress
- Eyeglasses for the Blind: Redundant Therapies in Meschinot and Villon
- Jean de Meun in the Cité des Dames: Author versus Authority
- The Festival Context of Villon's Pet au Deable: Martinmas in Late-Medieval Paris
Summary
Despite such judicious scholarship as Florence Ridley's The Prioress and the Critics, a whole volume devoted to the matter, debate has continued on Chaucer's intentions regarding the character of his Prioress. A Revelation of Purgatory by an Unknown, Fifteenth-Century Woman Visionary (1422) provides an excellent comparison that lends clarity to Chaucer's portrait and suggests how readers of Chaucer's day may well have been predisposed to view the character. Details of the piece suggest that readers from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries would probably have found the Prioress culpable not so much because of her anti-Semitism, but due to her attachment to worldly pleasures inappropriate to a nun and especially to a prioress (given her position as head of and role model for a community).
Though it appeared twenty-two years after Chaucer's death, A Revelation of Purgatory confirms that others during that time period were reflecting on those traits exhibited in the Prioress; the work provides a case-study exhibiting the grim imprudency of behaviors unbefitting members of religious orders – such indulgences as over-attentiveness to eating or dress and obsessive concern about pets. Chaucer is likely to have shared such opinions or at least to have felt himself reasonable in satirizing them despite his own attachment to secular as well as religious genres.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Fifteenth-Century Studies , pp. 105 - 111Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009