Can We Trust the Wife of Bath?

Author / Editor
Parker, David.

Title
Can We Trust the Wife of Bath?

Published
Chaucer Review 4.2 (1969): 90-98.

Description
Describes similarities and differences "between fourteenth-century and modern biography" and argues that medieval writers of verse fiction were interested in characters "as individuals." A "sense of abundant life" is generated by the ironies and contradictions in the depiction of the Wife and Bath; she is inconsistent in her claims, untrustworthy, and--far from being merely iconographical--individualistic.

Chaucer Subjects
Wife of Bath and Her Tale