The Wife of Bath's Shipman's Tale and the Invention of Chaucerian Fabliaux

Author / Editor
Dane, Joseph A.

Title
The Wife of Bath's Shipman's Tale and the Invention of Chaucerian Fabliaux

Published
Modern Language Review 99 (2004): 287-300

Description
During the nineteenth-century construction of the fabliau as a distinct genre, scholars grouped ShT with other "coarse" tales and theorized that Chaucer had reassigned it from the Wife of Bath to the Shipman, assuming that the fabliau form was not expansive enough to accommodate the Wife's complex psychological character. The logical and aesthetic assumptions underlying the reassignment need to be scrutinized.

Chaucer Subjects
Shipman and His Tale.