Alice of Bath: Her "Secte" and "Gentil Text."
- Author / Editor
- Mahoney, John.
Alice of Bath: Her "Secte" and "Gentil Text."
- Published
- Criticism 6 (1964): 144-55.
- Description
- Accepts that the first eighty-eight lines of WBP are a late addition, and argues that they reflect comic awareness of the unorthodox movement, the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit, echoing its valorization of sexual activity and multiple marriages, especially as it interprets the Biblical enjoinder to "wexe and multiplye," (WBP 3.28), and part of the reason that the Clerk responds so directly to the Wife.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Wife of Bath and Her Tale
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Clerk and His Tale