Ethnically different Mothers-in-Law in Chaucer's "Man of Law's Tale" and Its 2003 BBC adaptation

Abstract

When discussing the question of difference in the Middle Ages, it needs to be emphasised that differences between people were perceived primarily as cultural rather than biological in that epoch. Even though Chaucer writes about the two mothers-in-law in The Man of Law’s Tale as, respectively, Syrian (i.e. Eastern), and Northumbrian (i.e. Northern), he discusses the difference they stand for as religious and, more generally speaking, cultural, rather than ethnic or, to use the term anachronistically, racial. Robert Bartlett claims that we may refer to ethnicisation and racialisation interchangeably even in reference to the Middle Ages, so the terms “race” and “ethnicity” will co-exit here as well. Medieval race/ethnicity was directly related to cultural markers, so the biological ones were not so important. Quoting Bartlett’s formulation in The Making of Europe, “while the language of race – gens, natio, ‘blood,’ ‘stock,’ etc. – is biological, its medieval reality was almost entirely cultural.”1 The adaptation of The Man of Law’s Tale from 2003 is a part of the six-part series for the first time broadcast on BBC One and it modernises the topic of difference that the mothers-in-law in the medieval narrative represent.