Ask the Chatbot Games & Quizzes History & Society Science & Tech Biographies Animals & Nature Geography & Travel Arts & Culture ProCon Money Videos
The Prioress’s Tale
Introduction References & Edit History Related Topics
Quizzes
Illustration of "The Lamb" from "Songs of Innocence" by William Blake, 1879. poem; poetry
A Study of Poetry
4:043 Dickinson, Emily: A Life of Letters, This is my letter to the world/That never wrote to me; I'll tell you how the Sun Rose/A Ribbon at a time; Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul
Famous Poets and Poetic Form
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) only confirmed photograph of Emily Dickinson. 1978 scan of a Daguerreotype. ca. 1847; in the Amherst College Archives. American poet. See Notes:
Poetry: First Lines
Britannica AI Icon
Adding us as a Preferred Source tells Google you trust our content, so our articles show up more often in your Google Search, Discover feed, and AI Overviews.
verifiedCite
While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.
Select Citation Style
Feedback
Corrections? Updates? Omissions? Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login).
Thank you for your feedback

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

External Websites

The Prioress’s Tale

story by Chaucer
Written and fact-checked by
Britannica Editors
Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree....
Britannica Editors
History

The Prioress’s Tale, one of the 24 stories in The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.

The tale is based on an anti-Semitic legend of unknown origin that was popular among medieval Christians. The Prioress describes how a widow’s devout young son is abducted by Jews, who are supposedly prompted by Satan to murder the child to stop him from singing the hymn “O Alma redemptoris” to the Virgin Mary. One of the Jews slits the boy’s throat and casts his body into an open sewer. Miraculously, the boy is still able to sing and does so until his mother and a group of Christians find him. A provost condemns the guilty Jews to be executed, and before he dies the boy explains how the Virgin enabled him to continue singing after his throat was slit.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Kathleen Kuiper.