What happens in Chapter 15 of The Canterbury Tales?
The Prioress begins by invoking the Virgin Mary, framing her story as an act of devotion, and then recounts a miracle that takes place in an unnamed city in Asia. A young Christian boy, around seven years old, goes to school near a Jewish ghetto. Captivated by the Alma redemptoris mater sung by older students, he memorizes the hymn, despite not understanding any of the Latin. Each day, as he walks through the ghetto singing the anthem, he draws the wrath of Jews incited by Satan, who hire a murderer to kill him and dump his body into a privy pit. His mother searches desperately until she hears her son's voice miraculously singing from the pit. The Christian community finds the body, and a grain placed on the boy's tongue by the Virgin is identified as the source of the miracle. When the Abbot removes the grain, the boy dies. The Jews face condemnation: they are dragged by wild horses and hanged. The story concludes with a prayer to the child-martyr Hugh of Lincoln.
Analysis
Chaucer gives the Prioress a tale that outwardly seems pious but is underpinned by structural violence, and the contrast between these two elements is where the artistry lies. The Prioress's prologue—modeled after Dante's prayer to the Virgin in Paradiso XXXIII—creates a tone of bright, childlike humility ("I am a child of twelve months old or less"), which allows the tale's brutality to be cloaked in innocence. The boy in the story embodies pure, uncomprehending devotion: he sings what he cannot understand, and Chaucer sharpens that lack of understanding to a theological point—faith comes before comprehension, the spirit precedes the letter.
The tale is part of the miracles de Notre Dame tradition, yet Chaucer's portrayal of the Jewish community is explicitly antisemitic, using the medieval blood-libel trope without any irony or distance from the author. Critics disagree on whether the Prioress's characterization in the General Prologue—her affected courtliness and her motto Amor vincit omnia—positions the tale as an example of dramatic irony or if it simply reflects the prejudices of the time. Both interpretations warrant consideration: the tale stands as both a technically skilled lyric-narrative and a record of ideological damage.
The privy pit serves as the tale's most powerful image—a filthy place from which sacred song emerges untainted, flipping the logic of defilement on its head. The grain on the tongue makes the Eucharistic motif running through the hymn explicit. The tone shifts abruptly from hymnic elevation to judicial horror within a single stanza, and Chaucer does not attempt to smooth over that transition.
Key quotes from Chapter 15
“My throte is kut unto my nekke boon, / Seyde this child, and as by wey of kynde / I sholde have dyed, ye, longe tyme agoon.”
The murdered boy explains to the gathered Christians why he can still sing despite his fatal wound, attributing his voice solely to the Virgin's intervention.
“O Lord, oure Lord, thy name how merveillous / Is in this large world ysprad, quod she; / For noght oonly thy laude precious / Parfourned is by men of dignitee, / But by the mouth of children thy bountee / Parfourned is.”
The Prioress opens her prologue by paraphrasing Psalm 8, establishing the theological premise that divine praise flows most purely through the innocent and unlearned.
“This gemme of chastite, this emeraude, / And eek of martirdom the ruby bright, / Ther he with glorie and honour sat ful hye.”
Chaucer's narrator describes the slain boy in lapidary terms after his body is laid before the altar, fusing the iconography of precious stones with martyrdom and virginal purity.