How should we read the Wife of Bath?

Very carefully.

These passages show just a few of the differences between the version of the Wife of Bath's Prologue found in your text and that found in some early manuscripts. A quick look at these passages will not tell you whether the questioned passages are or or not Chaucerian; the study of manuscripts (palaeography and codicology) is an academic specialty requiring many years of training. But this quick tour may persuade you that the question -- what is Chaucerian? -- is much more complex than it first seems!

Several Chaucer scholars (see the bibliography for details) have made arguments concerning the set of passages you saw when you turned the first "leef."

  • Helen Cooper suggests that the four passages not found in Hengwrt "may represent revisions," presumably Chaucer's, though the first set of lines you studied "cannot be proved genuine" (139). Cooper also says that the scribe of Dd.4.24, whose version renumbers the Wife's husbands as well as including five passages not seen in Hengwrt and some other early mss., had "some intriguingly eccentric moments" (8).
  • But Beverly Kennedy has argued (1996) that the added passages in Dd and other manuscripts "may be scribal in origin" (343), and that such a scribe would have been a "misogynist" who (by his lights) sought to "improve" Chaucer's text (355).
  • However, Elizabeth Solopova, who has studied the manuscripts of the Wife of Bath extensively, has concluded that it is "highly likely" these passages are indeed Chaucer's, given their age, the evidence of the manuscripts, and the lines' literary quality.

    • At the very least, Chaucer may have made revisions to these passages; perhaps lines were added, or perhaps deleted but "imperfectly," that is, not on every copy.

    Much less has been written on the Fitzwilliam manuscript, whose readings appear in the "pop-up" windows linked to the second "leef."

  • Manly and Rickert say that the Fitzwilliam scribe was "clearly a practised writer" but "not accustomed to book-making" (169).
  • Kennedy (1997) claims that some manuscripts in the Fitzwilliam "family" often show "a more positive scribal attitude towards the Wife and marriage" (31) and that in some fifteenth-century manuscripts "striking scribal alternations [may] offer the best evidence of how Chaucer's near contemporaries responded to his work" (23).

    • Thoughts to ponder for our next meeting:

  • What is your impression of the Wife now? Do you see her as a sympathetic figure, unsympathetic? Modern or medieval? Raucous, pious, or somewhere in between?
  • Is it useful to know of the differences among early sources (and among Chaucer scholars and critics)?
  • If you accept the second set of readings found at the first "leef," how would you characterize the Wife's attitude towards men and marriage?
  • As you read the Wife of Bath's Tale, think about how it illuminates -- or is illuminated by -- the various "wives" seen on these pages. What sort of figure speaks this story? If you change your idea of the figure or speaker, does it change the story for you? If so, how?
  • Peter Robinson claims that the many manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales present a labyrinth, "a pre-deconstructed text of apocalyptic proportions" (44). Does a complicated reading of the Wife of Bath's Prologue have implications for reading and interpretation? If so, in what way(s)?
  • What questions do you have? What conclusions do you draw? Let your instructors know:
  • Send mail to Professor Yager (especially if you see typos!)
  • Send mail to Professor Betcher


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