Repainting the Lion: 'The Wife of Bath's Tale' and a Traditional British Ballad

Author / Editor
Wollstadt, Lynn M.

Title
Repainting the Lion: 'The Wife of Bath's Tale' and a Traditional British Ballad

Published
S. Elizabeth Passmore and Susan Carter, eds. The English "Loathly Lady" Tales: Boundaries, Traditions, Motifs (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), pp. 199-212.

Description
Wollstadt explores similarities between WBT and the ballad "The Knight and the Shepherd's Daughter," considering the rape motif, concern with "authority and victimization," the possibility that the ballad was transmitted by female oral singers, and the conflation in the ballad of the raped maiden and the wife.

Alternative Title
English Loathly Lady Tales: Boundaries, Traditions, Motifs.

Chaucer Subjects
Wife of Bath and Her Tale
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.