"so priketh hem Nature in hir corages"

Chaucer as a pilgrim from the Ellesmere manuscript.

"A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine"?

On the possible sexual meaning of "priketh" in line 11 of Chaucer's "General Prologue," I'm still poking around to see if anything comes up.

You'll recall the word and its immediate context (lines 9-11):

And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(so priketh hem Nature in hir corages);

Dictionaries haven't so far provided much satisfaction on this issue, but I have yet to gaze at what the ever-stimulating Oxford English Dictionary has to unveil about "priketh" in Middle English.

The Online Etymological Dictionary that I cited yesterday does add that:

My prick was used 16c.-17c. as a term of endearment by "immodest maids" for their boyfriends.

How times change. No boyfriend would wish such a term of endearment these days. But the online etymology doesn't get to the point anyway, for it only alludes to Early Modern English, some 200 years later than Chaucer.

More to the point is what Stephen Knight writes in his article (pdf) "Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales" for Literature in Context, edited by Rick Rylance and Judy Simons (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2001):

The small birds are the first animals to wake in spring -- as in any morning -- but they too have cultural reference. They are 'smale', which means 'slender' not just small: the word is English, but has French connotations: ladies in romance are 'smale' in body, arms and fingers. Nature excites the birds' romantic love when it 'priketh' their hearts in blunt English, and this implies physicality -- the sexual pun on 'prick' operates in Middle as well as Modern English. But elaboration still exists because it is their 'corages' that are excited, not their 'hearts'. The French word points towards the domain of courtly love, an aristocratic elaboration that Chaucer himself has disseminated in English with his translation of part of The Romance of the Rose and his earlier dream poems about love like The Book of the Duchess. (p. 12)

Knight is a respected scholar, so I assume that he knows what he's talking about in stating that "the sexual pun on 'prick' operates in Middle as well as Modern English," but I do wish that he had cited a source. As they say, "Trust, but verify."

I suppose that I'll keep probing into this prickly query...