A Revelation of Purgatory and Chaucer's Prioress

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.