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"To wondre upon this thyng": Chaucer's Prioress's Tale

Abstract Examining the miraculous things in Chaucer's Prioress's Tale, this essay suggests that the importance of such things lies in their resistance to clear signification, a resistance that unsettles their human observers even as it reconstitutes them. The tale posits wonder as the product of a series of ontologically ambiguous things — the automata-like body of the little clergeon and his mysterious greyn but also the tale itself, as a literary object that produces a wondrous response in its audience. Chaucer's depiction of this series of wondrous things shows him to be interested in the incommensurability of certain kinds of things, as part of a sustained meditation on the exigencies of religious wonder itself. The Prioress's Tale thus suggests that at the crux of object and thing, animate and inanimate, the intelligible and the indeterminate lies a double-edged wonder at the miraculous: displaying a deferential mode of passive response to a privileged miraculous object while nonetheless reasserting the priority of the subject, suppressing, containing, and silencing the things that produced such passivity in the first place.