Uxor and Alison: Noah's Wife in the Flood Plays and Chaucer's Wife of Bath

Author / Editor
Storm, Melvin.

Title
Uxor and Alison: Noah's Wife in the Flood Plays and Chaucer's Wife of Bath

Published
Modern Language Quarterly 48 (1987): 303-19.

Description
Alison shares features with that "popular exemplar of medieval comic shrewishness," Noah's wife of the mystery plays, and especially the Uxor Noe of the Towneley cycle: old husbands, outspokenness, direct address to the audience, fondness of "gossips," love of gadding about, disobedience, verbal and physical violence, beguilement, failure to keep the husbands' secrets, and textile occupations.

Chaucer Subjects
Wife of Bath and Her Tale.