Vital Property in "The Wife of Bath's Prologue" and "Tale."

Description: Uses several medieval court cases and posthumanist perspective to examine medieval notions of "corporeal property," arguing that, by comparing property relations to a "spousal and familial one," the Wife of Bath persistently destabilizes the subordination of property to human owners. Property in WBPT is "vital" insofar as it has agency and reflects equivalency between human and nonhuman entities, evident in the imagery and plots of the Wife's narration and similar to the environmentalism of Aldo Leopold.