Using ironic techniques deplored by Christine, Chaucer is often misunderstood by modern audiences. Rigby contrasts Christine's "comprehensive defence of women" with Chaucer's satire in WBP, where Alisoun is the target.
Croft, Steven, ed.
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
A school-text Middle English edition of WBPT and the GP description of the Wife, with notes and glosses after the text, along with comments on critical approaches and contexts and on Chaucer's language and pronunciation; pedagogical activities and…
Shippey, Thomas A.
In Heroes and Legends: The Most Influential Characters of Literature. Chantilly, VA: The Great Courses, 2014. Video recording. Disc 1 of 4, Lecture 5.
Video recording of lecture (ca. 30 min.), with illustrations, accompanied by an edited text of the lecture in the Course Guidebook (pp. 31-36). Comments on details of the Wife's character in GP, WBP as an autobiography, the Wife's challenges to…
Both narrators and tales (WBT, ClT) owe much to the traditional portraits of rhetoric and dialectic (logic, philosophy), e.g., in Martianus Capella and Alan of Lille. The pilgrims are composites not of "estates satire" conventions but of details…
Higl, Andrew.
Nancy A. Barta-Smith and Danette DiMarco, eds. Inhabited by Stories: Critical Essays on Tales Retold (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), pp. 294-313.
Reads various adaptations of WBPT in light of the time in which each of the individual "iterations" of the Wife was produced, from scribal adjustments in manuscripts, to ballad versions, to John Gay's dramatic adaptation and William Blake's…
Close reading of Jerome's "Against Jovinian" indicates that in WBP the Wife of Bath agrees with Jerome, even though she shifts the emphasis from the superiority of virginity to the acceptability of marriage. At Jankyn's death, she becomes, like her…
Bowden, Betsy.
Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press, 2017.
Analyzes manifestations of the Wife of Bath throughout 1660-1810, in seven chapters on primarily verbal art and seven on primarily visual art. Melds methodologies from the disciplines of literature, art history, musicology, education, folklore, print…
Smith, Warren S.
Chaucer Review 32 (1997): 129-45.
In WBP, the Wife takes not an extremist position on marriage but rather a centralist one, often adhering to the doctrine of Augustine. By burning Jankin's book and by according husbands bliss after she attains "mastery," Alisoun refutes the…
Gedalof, Alan, and Michael Moore.
Princeton, N.J.: Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 1996.
Gedalof and Moore discuss the Wife of Bath and WBPT in their social and literary contexts, especially as they reflect issues of male-female relations. Illustrations from historical manuscripts and paintings, and from contemporary visual…
Marwitz, Will[ard].
[Jay Ruud, ed.] Papers on the "Canterbury Tales": From the 1989 NEH Chaucer Institute, Northern State University, Aberdeen, South Dakota ([Aberdeen, S.D.: Northern State University, 1989), pp. 158-75.
Comments on assessments of the Wife of Bath as either a "Scarlet Woman" or a "truly liberated woman," concluding that she is best seen as "complicated." Includes a series of "Student Challenges" as a study guide to WBP.
Hoffman, Richard L.
Notes and Queries 209 (1964): 287-88.
Maintains that the Wife of Bath's knowledge of the "remedies of love" and of the "art" of love's "olde daunce" (GP 1.475-76) refer to, respectively, Ovid's "Remedia Amoris" and "Ars Amatoria," familiar to her, perhaps ("per chaunce") because Jankyn…
Compares carnivalesque elements of WBPT to performance techniques of modern, unruly, "women on top" comediennes such as Roseanne Barr and female impersonators such as Barry Humphries (Dame Edna Everage).
Stock, Lorraine, and Betty J. Proctor.
Medieval Perspectives 25 (2010): 103-23.
Demonstrates Daniel Defoe's familiarity with CT, and documents the fundamental influence of Chaucer's Wife of Bath on the form and content of "Moll Flanders."
Leicester, H. Marshall,Jr.
Paul Strohm and Thomas J. Heffernan, eds. Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Proceedings, No. 1, 1984 (Knoxville, Tenn.: New Chaucer Society, 1985), pp. 201-210.
The astrological passages provide "alternative explanations of the same behavior"--both freedom and determinism--and explain antifeminism partly as male impotence. The Wife as "subject" exists in unresolvable tensions and indeterminancies.
The Wife of Bath's performance constitutes a bourgeois, female countercommentary by a literate property owner to the dominant male aristocratic and ecclesiastical conceptions of marriage, sex, learning, and economic power in the later Middle Ages.
Haller, Robert S.
Annuale Mediaevale 6 (1965): 47-64.
Explores how female sovereignty in WBPT results in "the subservience of the class function to the bourgeois ethic which the Wife represents," indicating parallels in FranT and Genesis. Alison controls the merchant class in her first three marriages;…
Lawrence, William W.
Modern Language Notes 72.2 (1957): 87-88.
Disagrees with R. L. Chapman's argument (1956) that the Shipman was the original teller of ShT, offering further evidence that Chaucer first assigned the narrative to the Wife of Bath.
Grennen, Joseph E.
Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 7 (1986): 41-48.
Draws upon theories of Aristotle, Bradwardine, Aquinas, and the scholastics on action ("operatio") to explain the complexities of the Wife's character and the nobility of the hag's lecture--through the Wife's competence in "scholastic give-and-take."
Longsworth, Robert (M.)
Chaucer Review 34: 372-87, 2000.
Through her use of the Samaritan woman, the Wife argues for the "exegetical reliability" of her own experience. Longsworth explores several biblical references in WBP and their exegetical backgrounds to show how the Wife, even while more…
Bott, Robin L.
Medieval Perspectives 6 (1991): 154-61.
When describing her fourth husband, the Wife is silent on topics freely discussed with respect to her other husbands (particularly money, age, and temperment); this suggests the equality of the two in these areas. Their marriage fails because the…
Magee, Patricia A.
Massachusetts Studies in English 3 (1971): 40-45.
Argues that the Wife of Bath is a "psychologically complex character" and that WBPT reveal that she desires, not mastery per se, but "'that thing which she does not have'" (italics in original), signaling a discrepancy between what she "thinks she…
Alisoun has learned through experience that her marital happiness depends upon practical economic control rather than on surrender to the ideals of feminine subservience espoused by authorities. Her tale parodies these authorities in its…
