The Prioress's Tale

The Prioress's Tale, painted in 1865 on paper and held at the Delaware Art Museum, is one of several works Burne-Jones based on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales — a text that he and William Morris valued among the greatest works of English literature. The Prioress's Tale tells the story of a pious young boy murdered by Jews for singing a Marian hymn, whose miraculous posthumous singing leads to the discovery of his body and the punishment of his killers. The tale is deeply problematic in its antisemitism, but Victorian readers and artists engaged with it primarily as a story of Marian devotion and child martyrdom within the medieval Christian world. Burne-Jones focused on the devotional and emotional aspects rather than the tale's most disturbing elements. The Delaware Art Museum's Pre-Raphaelite holdings make it a significant American repository for works of this type.

Worked on paper with the precise, densely detailed handling that Burne-Jones brought to his smaller-scale works on this support. The subject allows for the combination of Gothic ecclesiastical architectural setting with the delicate figure treatment he had absorbed from illuminated manuscript sources.