Wifes tale

Wife of Bath, including her prologue, to be the most thought-provoking. The

pilgrim who narrates this tale, Alison, is a gap-toothed, partially deaf

seamstress and widow who has been married five times. She claims to have great

experience in the ways of the heart, having a remedy for whatever might ail it.

Throughout her story, I was shocked, yet pleased to encounter details which were

rather uncharacteristic of the women of Chaucer's time. It is these

peculiarities of Alison's tale which I will examine, looking not only at the

chivalric and religious influences of this medieval period, but also at how she

would have been viewed in the context of this society and by Chaucer himself.

During the period in which Chaucer wrote, there was a dual concept of

chivalry, one facet being based in reality and the other existing mainly in the

imagination only. On the one hand, there was the medieval notion we are most

familiar with today in which the knight was the consummate righteous man,

willing to sacrifice self for the worthy cause of the afflicted and weak; on the

other, we have the sad truth that the human knight rarely lived up to this

would like to think that Chaucer was a remarkably visionary man in setting forth

surely a journey beyond the realms of normalcy, possibly planting the seeds of

scripture to support her radical stance, yet Chaucer allows her to err in her

views regarding marriage and virginity, using her knowledge of the scriptures to

application. The mistake lies in her analogy of the loaves of bread in which

Some topics in this essay:
King Arthur, Wife Bath, Alison Bath, Middle Ages, Mark Jesus, Bath's Wife, Wife Bath's, Chaucer's Howard, Canterbury Tales, Hunter College, middle ages, alison's tale, geoffrey chaucer, geoffrey chaucer york, chaucer york, wife bath, king arthur, ages surely, period chaucer, canterbury tales, middle ages surely,