The Poor and Their Power: Images of Poor Women in Medieval Literature and Art.
- Author / Editor
- Scott, Anne M. Vergasser.
The Poor and Their Power: Images of Poor Women in Medieval Literature and Art.
- Published
- Sharon Farmer, ed. Approaches to Poverty in Medieval Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 229-52.
- Description
- Explores enigmatic medieval attitudes toward poverty through the allegorical figures of three "loathly ladies"--Lady Poverty (Franciscan "Sacrum commercium"), Chaucer's Wife of Bath's hag, and Glad Poverty (Prologue to Book III of Lydgate's "Fall of Princes")--and concludes that they reveal how poverty was feared but also revered as spiritually and morally transformative. Discusses the hag's sermon on the merits of poverty in WBT, and suggests that the knight's acceptance of the hag's poverty, and her lesson that gentilesse cannot be passed on by birth, brings with it a moral reward reflected in Christian Scripture.
- Alternative Title
- Approaches to Poverty in Medieval Europe.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Wife of Bath and Her Tale