Will any literary character written this decade still be as famous in the 27th century as Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is today? The most memorable pilgrim from The Canterbury Tales, with her five husbands, her gap teeth and her big red hat, is still inspiring novels and plays, bars of soap and even organic cheeses (as one enterprising maker has it: “New Wyfe of Bath: now merrier and extra mature!”). She’s been translated by Voltaire, Dryden and Pope (who cut out the rude bits, leaving her prologue about half its original length); depicted on screen by Laura Betti and Julie Walters; and adapted by Jean Binta Breeze and Zadie Smith, among many others. If you’re wondering why this 14th-century figure is considered so much fun, then Marion Turner, a Chaucer biographer and Oxford professor of English literature, is here to tell you. And happily, she puts all the rude bits back in.
Referring to her heroine by her first name throughout, Turner tells us that “Alison” was “the first ordinary woman in English literature”. Unlike the allegorical princesses and sorceresses who preceded her, she is a “mercantile, working, sexually active woman”, like many of her time. Turner explains that the plague, like the first world war, created huge opportunities for women. They did go on pilgrimages, as the 14th-century Pilgrimage Window in York Minster shows. They also remarried – “Chaucer’s own mother had been widowed sometime after January 1366 and was married again before June.” They wrote books, joined guilds and hired apprentices. The Wife of Bath, a clothmaker by trade, would have been entirely familiar to Chaucer’s audience as they listened to her story about “what women want”.
