The Use Of Blood Libel Stories In Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales

Blood libel stories, tales that propagated the claim that Jews used the blood of Christian children in their religious rituals, were very common throughout the Middle Ages. Even literary masterpieces such as Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales were not exempt from this popular practice. In his 14th century collection of short stories, Chaucer writes the Prioress’s Tale, a story about a Christian child martyr who is kidnapped and slaughtered by a community of Jews (Chaucer, 170-176). Blatantly propagating false anti-Semitic ideas, the Prioress’s Tale, and other blood libel stories for that matter, did not arise from nowhere. Rather, it is a result of a 13th Century movement by the Catholic Church to instill fear and anger against the Jewish community in Europe. The 12th Century marked a time of amiable harmony between Jews and the
These stories often illustrate Jews as cannibalistic monsters who partake in satanic rituals (Moss). The basic premise of these stories is completely false as it claimed that Jews follow a creed that actually runs contrary to the true teachings of Judaism. The Ten Commandments, an important influence on Jewish conduct, alone confirms that the murder of children violates a basic moral of the Jewish doctrine (New International Version, Exod. 20.13). In the case of the Prioress’s Tale, an English story, it is clear how the absence of Jews in the community can induce the creation of such erroneous tales. A common 14th century Englishman had probably never encountered a Jewish man due to the expulsion of Jews in the late 13th century. Thus, it can be argued that, to him, a Jew was just as mythical as was a unicorn. In this way, the distortion of Jewish culture was inevitable with the consideration of the great anti-Semitic movement that had taken place only a century or two