Before the Prioress’s own tale even starts, it opens with a prologue that reads like a prayer — addressed straight to Mary, the mother of Jesus, asking for help simply to tell the story that follows. “Help me to tell it to thy dignity,” she asks. If you’re going to understand what she does with that help once she has it, you have to be willing to set your own religious position aside — whatever it is — and understand something about how the medieval Church actually worked in people’s lives. Not believe it. Understand it.
John Locke, writing centuries later, used a simple image for the human mind at birth — a blank slate, a freshly erased blackboard, nothing written on it yet. Everything we come to believe in Locke’s philosophy gets written there afterward, through experiences — through our senses (see, hear, smell, taste, touch). His philosophy opposed the older idea that we’re born already knowing certain things, like the difference between good and evil.
The blackboard is a useful image for reading classical literature, and not because it’s philosophy. The blackboard — and erasing it — is useful because by the time any of us read a 700-year-old poem, our blackboards are already full of stuff that we believe to be true — things about religion, tolerance, love, hate. None of that was written there at birth. Somebody wrote it. And if you read The Prioress’s Tale through what’s already on your own blackboard, you’ll miss the entire point (actually, if you can’t erase your blackboard when you read ANY classical literature you’ll miss a lot).
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.
For roughly 1,500 years — starting with Ptolemy in ancient Greece — it was “obviously true” that the earth sat at the center of the universe and the sun moved around it. Not a theory. A fact, as plain as anything your senses told you: look up, and you can watch the sun move across the sky. You can’t feel yourself moving. Why would you doubt it? When Copernicus proposed the alternative in 1543 — that we’re the ones going around the sun — it took nearly a century to be accepted, and when Galileo confirmed it, he was nearly burned at the stake for it. Not because the evidence was weak. Because the blackboard had been written on for a millennium and a half, and a blackboard like that doesn’t erase because someone points at the sky and says otherwise.
Prejudice works exactly the same way. It can be as small as a preference for a particular brand of coffee that you’ll defend a little too energetically if someone questions it. It can be something you inherited so early and so completely that unwinding it — really asking yourself why you believe it, and then asking why again, and again, until you hit the bottom of the reasoning — feels less like thinking and more like losing something. I remember coming home from college and telling my mother that there was no God. She cried. Jimmy, what did I send you to Catholic school for? I told her not to worry — I was testing my faith like they tell us, not abandoning it. But that’s what it feels like when someone else’s hand reaches for your blackboard. It doesn’t feel like an idea being examined. It feels like an attack.
So when you get to the part of this tale that deals with the concept of “Jew” — and you will, in the next post — understand that it was written on blackboards the same way the sun’s orbit was: not as an opinion held tentatively, but as settled fact. That doesn’t make such “facts” true.
Erase your blackboard before we go further. It’s the only way to see what’s written on the Prioress’ or anyone’s for that matter, including yours.