Suffer the Little Children, or, A Rumination on the Faith of Zombies

In modern psychological parlance rumination names a neurotic brooding, a persistent, relentless mental replaying of a bad memory. In a more medieval context rumination is the practice of “chewing over” a well-known and constantly re-read text to achieve insight into the nature of God and the universe. What follows here is, in a way, a cross-temporal rumination or (to alter the alimentary metaphor a little) a worrying of a text of a text that worries me.The Prioress’s Tale’s narrative of the Litel Clergeon’s death, partial resurrection and second death is a text that I for one have never satisfactorily digested. The story is an (alas) familiar medieval reflex of the blood-libel: a pious young child is murdered by Jews as he walks the ghetto singing a Christian hymn. But the lurid details of this narrative replay themselves, I expect, in many a reader’s memory: the slaughtered child hidden in shit; the frantic, weeping mother; the abbot, astounded and confounded by the miraculous discovery of the corpse; the outraged Christian crowd caught up in anti-Semitic rhetoric and bloody vengeance; and especially, at the center of it all, the grotesque body of the Litel Clergeon itself. For it is not, after all, a living seven-year-old boy who sings: it is, rather, his corpse that will not shut up. Nor is that corpse merely moaning or shrieking: that it sings a hymn like O Alma Redemptoris Mater, and might (theoretically) sing it forever unless re-murdered, makes the dark grotesquerie of he spectacle of this undead child all the more pervasive. Throat slit, as the Litel Clergeon says, “unto my nekke boon”(VII.649),1 the child’s body serves as an eloquent witness to the power of God, yes, but hardly to anything like the mercy or love proclaimed in the hymn. For that ghastly singing body is stuck, zombie-like, forever on the verge of dying, a victim of violence producing future violence and propagating further victims.