Chaucers Canterbury Tales - The Incredible Wife of Baths Tale :: Wife of Bath Essays

Chaucers Canterbury Tales - The Incredible Wife of Baths Tale In reading Geoffrey Chaucers Canterbury Tales, I pitch that of the Wife of Bath, including her prologue, to be the intimately thought-provoking. The pilgrim who narrates this floor, Alison, is a gap-toothed, partially deaf hatmaker and widow who has been married five times. She claims to start great experience in the ways of the heart, having a remedy for whatever might ail it. end-to-end her story, I was shocked, yet pleased to encounter details which were rather a representative of the women of Chaucers time. It is these peculiarities of Alisons 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 base in reality and the other existing mainly in the de sire 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, uncoerced 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 i traverse(Patterson 170). In a work by Muriel Bowden, Associate Professor of face at Hunter College, she explains that the knights of the Middle Ages were merely mounted soldiers, . . . notorious for their reveal cruelty(18). The tale Baths Wife weaves exposes that Chaucer was aware of both forms of the medieval soldier. Where as his noesis that knights were often far from perfect is evidenced in the beginning of Alisons tale where the lusty soldier rapes a young maiden King Arthur, whom the ladies of the surface area beseech to spare the life of the guilty horse soldier, offers us the typical conception of knighthood. In addition to acknowledging this dichotomy of ideas abo ut chivalry, Chaucer also brings into unbelief the religious views of his time through this tale. The loquacious Alison spends a good deal of the prologue espousing her views regarding marriage and virginity, using her knowledge of the scriptures to add strength to her arguments. For instance, she