"The pitous pite deserveth": Justice, Violence, and Pity in the "Prioress's Tale" and "The Jew and the Pagan."

Author/Editor
Hines, Jessica.

Title
"The pitous pite deserveth": Justice, Violence, and Pity in the "Prioress's Tale" and "The Jew and the Pagan."

Published
Hines, Jessica. "'The pitous pite deserveth': Justice, Violence, and Pity in the "Prioress's Tale" and 'The Jew and the Pagan'" Exemplaria 34, no. 2 (2022), pp. 130-47.

Review
Hines reads Gower's "The Jew and the Pagan" in dialogue with Chaucer's "Prioress's Tale" in order to "see how intersections of justice and pity are formed by processes of identity and identification--who can and cannot feel pity, who can and cannot be identified with (132). She claims Gower's and Chaucer's tales in dealing with pity and violent justice "belong to an emergent 'structure of feeling' in fourteenth-century England" (132), using Raymond Williams's term. To elucidate her use of Williams's term, Hines discusses emergent affective experience, and then notes that such structures of feeling are located in language change. To apply this to the late fourteenth century Middle English lexicon, Hines details the uses of the word "pitee"--particularly in Gower and Chaucer's works where violent justice and pity intersect along anti-Semitic lines. She suggests "we can see [Gower and Chaucer] exploring the social, ethical, and religious complexities of the juncture between pity and justice in the processes of identity and identification" (133). Turning to Gower's "The Jew and the Pagan," Hines establishes Gower's use of pity in Book VII of "Confessio Amantis," assessing how he "identifies pity as incarnational" (134). Hines explains that, in this context, "The Jew and the Pagan" is "an example of and warning against misguided attachment to justice without mercy" (134). Quoting lines 3330-35, Hines asserts that Gower includes an extended gloss on Matthew 5:7 but changes it in one critical way by suggesting that those who show pity deserve pity. She continues, then, to demonstrate how Gower frames the foes of those who serve pity, naming two significant consequences for such an intersection of pity and justice. For Hines, "The real danger in Gower's tale, however, is that pitilessness becomes an 'essential' part of Jewish identity," (136), which of course then means that, by the tale's logic, the violent justice the Jew receives is somehow deserved. While agreeing with R. F. Yeager's assertion that "decision serves as the foundational marker of Jewishness for Gower in this tale," Hines adds that Gower's descriptions of such decision and the feelings that motivate it "ground Jewish difference in bodily difference and essentialize Jewish 'perversity' in ways that directly tie into medieval antisemitic narratives" (136). Hines presents a useful close reading of the tale to illustrate her argument, then, before shifting her discussion to the "Prioress's Tale." The comparison hinges upon Gower's and Chaucer's shared use of the verb "deserve"--the desert being pity in Gower and evil in Chaucer. Hines suggests Chaucer's tale "reflects the structure we saw in Gower that the pitying deserve violent justice" (138). In Chaucer's tale, the one pitying is the mother searching for her slain son, framing her as being persecuted despite being part of the Christian majority of the tale. Hines then discusses the critical discourse surrounding the Prioress vis-à-vis her portrait in the "General Prologue" compared to the tale she tells. She concludes "pity often falls into patterns of maintaining the self and the same" (139); furthermore, "for Chaucer and Gower, 'not-Jewish' resolves in an identity that is able to feel and embody pity and that merits violent justice through its pity" (139). [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.]

Date
2022

Gower Subjects
Confessio Amantis
Language and Word Studies
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations