Job's Wife, Walter's Wife, and the Wife of Bath

Author / Editor
Astell, Ann W.

Title
Job's Wife, Walter's Wife, and the Wife of Bath

Published
Raymond-Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcik, eds. Old Testament Women in Western Literature (Conway, Ark.: UCA Press, 1991), pp. 92-107.

Description
Gregory's Moralia in Job not only associates Job's wife with Eve as the archetypal temptress but also links her voice to the feminine speaking of poetry, with its imagistic power to move, delight, and (mis)instruct. Chaucer refashions her in CT in the double form of Alisoun of Bath and patient Griselda, using the stories of these two Joban wives to dramatize his own troubled relationship to his literary inheritance, especially Latin clerical writings.

Alternative Title
Old Testament Women in Western Literature.

Chaucer Subjects
Canterbury Tales--General.
Clerk and His Tale.
Wife of Bath and Her Tale.
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.