Madam Eglantine

Madam Eglantine, the Prioress and a nun among the pilgrims, is one of the figures whose circumstances the narrator pauses to describe before the storytelling begins. Her importance lies less in a developed sequence of later actions than in the densely coded portrait through which the narrative examines religious identity, social aspiration, manners, and appearance within the pilgrimage company.

Identity and Introduction

Madam Eglantine is introduced as a Nun and a Prioress. She is named explicitly as Madam Eglantine, giving her an honorific that places her religious office alongside the forms of address associated with secular gentility. The narrator presents her as part of the group preparing to travel on pilgrimage, where people desire to journey toward foreign shores and distant shrines renowned in many lands. Her presence therefore links institutional religion with the larger communal enterprise of the pilgrimage.

The narrator announces that it is reasonable to say something about the pilgrims and to relate their circumstances as they appeared to him. This framing matters for Madam Eglantine: she is not described through an abstract account of conventual doctrine, but through observable conduct, speech, dress, and social manner. Her portrait becomes a record of how a religious woman makes herself legible within a mixed company of clerics, professionals, landowners, and travelers.

Devotion and Religious Performance

Madam Eglantine has a notably restrained oath. Her greatest oath is only “By Saint Loy!” The smallness of the oath marks her as decorous and avoids the stronger or more worldly profanity that the narrator might associate with less controlled behavior. It gives her speech a religious coloring while also making her manners part of the portrait’s surface comedy.

Her religious accomplishment is especially associated with singing. She excels at singing when church services are held, intoning melodiously through her nose. The description acknowledges genuine participation in worship, yet the nasal quality of the singing keeps the praise from becoming wholly solemn. Her devotion is thus filtered through the narrator’s attentive ear: sacred service is present, but so is the physical and social performance by which it is carried out.

Manners, Appetite, and Gentility

The portrait repeatedly emphasizes cultivated behavior. Madam Eglantine is described as good company, pleasant, and amiable. In her bearing she takes pains to imitate refined manners, making gentility not simply an inner quality but a visible discipline of posture, conduct, and social interaction. Her charm helps her move comfortably among the pilgrims and gives her a worldly polish beyond the bare identification of her as a nun.

Her table manners reinforce this image. She is discreet and never reaches unseemly for the meat. The detail is intentionally concrete: refinement appears in the controlled movement of the body at meals. At the same time, the need to mention such behavior suggests that her social identity is being measured by secular standards of courtesy as much as by religious standards of humility.

Dress and Material Display

Madam Eglantine’s clothing supplies another important layer of the portrait. She wears a rosary around her wrist made of green coral beads, from which hangs a brooch of golden sheen. The rosary identifies her with religious practice, but its coral, color, and gold also make it an ornament. The object therefore occupies the boundary between devotional sign and personal display.

The narrator’s attention to the rosary and brooch makes material appearance part of her public identity. Her religious office does not erase the visible language of wealth, taste, and adornment; instead, those languages are woven together in the image she presents to the company. Madam Eglantine’s portrait consequently participates in the wider social survey of the pilgrims, in which clothing, occupation, manners, and possessions disclose how people inhabit or perform their place in society.

Narrative Role and Significance

Madam Eglantine is a compact but revealing example of the narrator’s method. He neither reduces her to a simple hypocrite nor offers an unqualified saintly portrait. Her oath is modest, her singing belongs to church worship, and her conduct is pleasant and carefully mannered. Yet the same portrait lingers over imitation, appetite, bodily technique, and ornament, inviting attention to the gap between religious vocation and aristocratic-style self-presentation.

Her role in the pilgrimage is therefore emblematic rather than plot-driving. She helps establish the company as a social microcosm in which sacred purpose coexists with worldly distinctions. Through her, the narrative shows that even a nun’s identity can be communicated through the intertwined signs of office, voice, table manners, jewelry, and courtesy. Madam Eglantine remains memorable because the portrait holds these elements together without resolving their tension: devotion and display, institutional status and social ambition, religious symbol and ornamental beauty.