The Prioress' Tale
Content warning: violence against children, child death, racism. Click here to skip ahead.
After the Seaman wraps up his story, the Host tells him "wow, that was great. No, really. Here's to a thousand more years of you being a sailor," presumably implying that he should stay out at sea and keep his stories far away. Then the Host says, all right, you're up Prioress, and the Prioress says 'kay, so before I start I'm going to say a long-ass ode to the virgin Mary, but I super-promise this story isn't going to be a huge drag.
It does help that this tale is the shortest (completed) tale so far. I'll let you be the judge of whether or not the fact that it's the first one told by a woman is significant. Also despite being super-short, it still manages to squeeze in grisly murder and blatant racism, so content warnings for those.
Oh and a fun piece of knowledge before we start: I did a brief Wikipedia dive because I wanted to know how the Prioress's claim that Mary was an eternal virgin held up against the fact that Jesus was on record as having siblings, and it turns out that the Catholic Church had to make some VERY choice interpretations of the Bible to fit their narrative. We're talking like flat-earther-levels of denial here. Anyway, story time:
There was a city in Asia (not relevant) that had a Jewish quarter (also not relevant unless your society is very anti-Semite, which Chaucer's very much was). A main thoroughfare passes through this section of the city, and one kid has to walk that street to get to school. The kid is seven years old, the son of a widow. Just like every kid that age, he had an obsession. My obsession was Pokémon. However, his obsession is the virgin Mary, which officially makes him a weirder kid than me.
So he does all the praying and reverencing and all that jazz. Then one day he hears a hymn that really strikes him, and he asks an older boy about it, and he's told it's about the holy mother. Of course that's all the kid needs to hear, and he has the older boy teach him all the Latin he needs to understand the song.
Having quickly mastered the song, the kid sings it every day on his way to school, and his way home from school. Of course, this means that he has to sing it as he passes through the Jewish quarter. Satan decides it's time to stir up some shit and tells the Jews, hey, you hearing this kid sing about Jesus stuff?
And they respond, we're Hebrews in Asia, why the hell would we understand Latin?
Actually, they agree that the most reasonable decision here is to murder the seven-year-old kid who likes to sing a song that's less annoying than what most seven-year-olds would pick. So they hire a guy who grabs the kid, cuts open his throat, and tosses the body in a privy.
Soon his mother stops by the area looking for her kid, and just when she's about to give up hope, she hears singing—the kid's hymn, in his own voice, despite his throat being sliced! Because of this, they're able to find his body, and he gets paraded to the local chapel.
The kid has a brief conversation with the local abbot saying that the blessed Mary had visited him while he was dying and told him to sing. Then she placed a grain on his tongue, saying she would be back for him when the grain is removed. The abbot immediately removes the grain and the boy returns to lifelessness. He gets a grand funeral, and many Jews get tortured to death by being dragged behind horses as punishment.
I apologize I couldn't end this on a lighter note, but I can only work with what I'm given.
Here ends the Prioress's Tale.