The Prioress's Tale

She maintains a secular lifestyle, including keeping lap dogs that she privileges over people, a fancy rosary and a brooch inscribed with Amor vincit omnia ('Love Conquers All').

Her story is of a child martyr killed by Jews, a common theme in Medieval Christianity[broken anchor], and much later criticism focuses on the tale's antisemitism.

"My throte is kut unto my nekke boon," Seyde this child, "and as by wey of kynde I sholde have dyed, ye, longe tyme agon.

But Jesu Crist, as ye in bookes fynde, Wil that his glorie laste and be in mynde, And for the worship of his Mooder deere Yet may I synge O Alma loude and cleere.

The Pardoner's materialistic orientation, his suspicious relics and accusations of sinfulness (evident in his conflict with the Host) align him with Paul's account of the "outward Jew, circumcised only in the flesh", rather than the "inward" Jew of Romans 2.29 who is spiritually rather than literally circumcised: "the Pardoner, outwardly 'a noble ecclesiaste', actually reduces Christianity to a code as rigorous and external as the Old Law itself.

She traces the impossibility of ultimately separating and opposing Old and New Laws in the "Prioress' Tale" back to a tension between letter and spirit internal to Paul's discourse itself.

Fradenburg notes that the substance of the "Prioress' Tale" can be linked to the "'child-host' miracle of the later Middle Ages" which involved the substitution of the "actual body of the Christ Child" for the Eucharist.