What Women Really Want: The Genesis of Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale

Author / Editor
Field, P. J. C.

Title
What Women Really Want: The Genesis of Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale

Published
Arthurian Literature 27 (2010): 59-83.

Description
Reviews scholarship that discusses analogues of WBT and hypothesizes the nature and date of the archetype of these tales, focusing on the relative chronology of major motifs, shared and unshared. A hypothetical summary of the archetype--presented as a basis for gauging Chaucer's originality--concludes the work.

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