Selling Alys: Reading (with) the Wife of Bath

Description: Explores Chaucer's strategy of satire in WBPT, arguing that in its concern with interpretation and discursive insensibility it is fundamentally similar to the anti-mercantile satire of MerT, ShT, and MLT. Reads the Wife in "a London context," associating her with guild-class silkwomen, and hypothesizes Chaucer's series of revisions to the Wife of Bath materials (including the manuscript glosses), which reduces mercantile concerns to those of gender and marriage while maintaining effective satire of the merchant estate.

Chaucer Subjects: Wife of Bath and Her Tale; Manuscripts and Textual Studies; Merchant and His Tale; Shipman and His Tale; Man of Law and His Tale