class of stories, popular at the time, known as the "miracles of the Virgin" such as those by Gautier de Coincy. It also blends elements of common story of a pious child killed by the enemies of the faith; the first example of which in English was written about William of Norwich. Matthew Arnold cited a stanza from the tale as the best of Chaucer's poetry. The Prioress and the Pardoner In "Chaucer's Prioress and the Sacrifice of Praise", Sherman Hawkins juxtaposes the Pardoner and the Prioress as the representatives of two radically different forms of religious expression. 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." In his tale, "the Pardoner presents death as the wages of sin, an effect of justice" while the "Prioress, through the paradox of martyrdom, shows it as mercy, an effect of grace." In "Criticism, Anti-Semitism and the Prioress' Tale", L. O. Fradenburg argues for a radical rereading of the binary oppositions between Christian and Jew, Old Law and New Law, literal and spiritual in the tale in part to critique the "patristic exegesis" of Sherman Hawkins' earlier interpretation. Fradenburg challenges Hawkins' "elision of the 'literal' or 'carnal' level of meaning in favour of the spiritual" by lingering on those moments in the tale, such as the "litel clergeon's" transgressive rote memorisation of the , in which this elision fails, or succeeds only ambiguously. 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 gestures at a larger project of turning "patristic exegesis" against itself to read the contradictions revealed by the theological subtext of the tale. 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. Such miraculous tales appear designed to reaffirm faith in the miraculous efficacy of transubstantiation in the face of the pressure of