This chapter examines how Chaucer uses acts of prayer to offer readers imaginative routes into religious alterity in The Man of Law’s Tale, The Knight’s Tale, and The Franklin’s Tale. The first of these tales is typically regarded as one of Chaucer’s “religious tales” and the other two as pagan “philosophical romances,” but these familiar critical categories obscure the fact that both piety and philosophy are important concerns in all three of these narratives. Acts of prayer and philosophical speeches feature prominently in each of them, and this chapter traces how Chaucer juxtaposes these two types of utterance and contends that prayer plays the more central role in his creative engagement with religious alterity. Chaucer’s interest in representing different religious worlds is widely recognized, but critical discussions have focused almost exclusively on his pagan settings and have privileged philosophical discourses as Chaucer’s primary representations of non-Christian belief. Rhetoric of intellectual freedom and experimentation has dominated these critical readings: pagan settings are described as “free of the specific assumptions and prohibitions of Christianity,” or as affording Chaucer an opportunity to re-open questions that had been “foreclosed by Christian dogma” in his own world. It is remarkable, however, how little Chaucer actually does with this freedom to depart from Christian tenets. All three of the tales addressed in this chapter, Christian and pagan alike, pose the same question of why a supreme providential deity allows innocent people to suffer, and all three answer it in the same orthodox but unsatisfying way, pointing out that humans cannot expect to understand God’s mysterious purposes. Chaucer does not avoid the Christian notion of a providential deity in The Knight’s Tale or The Franklin’s Tale, nor does he limit himself to complacent affirmation of it in The Man of Law’s Tale; indeed, arguably he “goes further and risks more” when he raises questions about providence in this Christian setting. I propose that the different religious worlds of these tales come into focus not primarily in how the characters think, but in how they pray.

In prayer, characters set aside the pursuit of rational explanations for their suffering and instead turn to the divine in search of hope and redress.