The Wife of Bath and the Three Estates.

Author / Editor
Haller, Robert S.

Title
The Wife of Bath and the Three Estates.

Published
Annuale Mediaevale 6 (1965): 47-64.

Description
Explores how female sovereignty in WBPT results in "the subservience of the class function to the bourgeois ethic which the Wife represents," indicating parallels in FranT and Genesis. Alison controls the merchant class in her first three marriages; the clergy in her marriage to Jankyn. In WBT, she subordinates the aristocratic King Arthur and the knight to female control.

Chaucer Subjects
Wife of Bath and Her Tale