The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer

There is one more layer, however, that lies under all the rest, and that explains the particular personality and drive of this woman more than anything else. This is her desire for ‘maistrye’ – the term that is at the core of the Tale she tells – and is represented in her description by the ‘paire of spores sharpe’ that is the last detail Chaucer gives of her dress. In the Tale , a new kind of ‘auctoritee’ is set up against the ‘experience’ of the Wife: the abusive chauvinism of a powerful male figure (the knight) who apparently thinks nothing of raping an innocent girl. The male approach to this crime is understandable enough: the knight should be beheaded. The female approach is to re-train and guide this man to an understanding that he must submit himself in all things to the guidance of a woman. This, in fact, becomes the very heart of the courtly ethic associated with the chivalrous attitudes of King Arthur’s court. In its context, it is a convincing argument for the supremacy of the female approach, and the Tale needs to be balanced with the Prologue so that the reader can assess it alongside the Wife’s rather less than courteous approach to ‘maistrye’ herself!

At the heart of the Tale , too, is one of Chaucer’s many statements regarding ‘gentilesse’ – that generosity of heart and gentility that is not a matter of noble birth, but of acquired behaviour. The Wife comes to represent, therefore, several important elements of change in medieval society: the gradual undermining of a hierarchy of values based solely on aristocratic primogeniture, as well as one based wholly on gender. Her very energy and resourcefulness implies the huge difficulties she has overcome in achieving genuine status as a woman in an entirely male-dominated world.

The Prologe of the Wyves tale of Bathe
by Geoffrey Chaucer

1 ‘Experience...auctoritee’ – the Middle Ages had a tremendous veneration for tradition that derived partly from the static nature of the society of the time, a deep conservatism and respect for the past, and also from the Catholic Church’s teaching on Tradition. Just as doctors of theology would dispute points of doctrine on the basis of past teachings from the Fathers or Church synods, so secular authors would quote Ovid, for example, on the subject of love with much the same sense of authority that a theologian would derive from quoting St Augustine on the subject of the Church. The Wife has certainly mastered her ‘auctoritees’ which she then twists to her own purposes.

3 ‘wo that is in mariage’ - the Wife implies that she will speak (in line with authorities such as St Jerome) of marriage from a negative point of view, contrasted with the greater good of virginity, though she goes on, characteristically, to do the opposite.