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”.
The tale she tells, and the other pilgrims’ reactions to it, would also be familiar. Turner mentions that “no other pilgrim is interrupted as much”. Plus ça change. She is also mocked for her witty outspokenness and her unashamed sexuality. The assumption that female pilgrims were a licentious lot is made plain in a magnificent image of a 14th-century pilgrim badge. It shows a vulva on legs, wearing a pilgrim’s hat and carrying a set of rosary beads and a phallus on a stick.
Like Chaucer’s Alison, and her tale, this book is an intriguing combination of the fantastically bawdy and the deadly serious. It contains all the academic throat-clearing you might expect from a dissertation (“In this second half of this biography, I trace … ”; “as the rest of this chapter will discuss … ”), and all the forensic research, too. We’re told that Alison’s prologue is “a staggering 856 lines long”, versus the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue at 166 and the Pardoner’s at a mere 154. There’s a thrilling close analysis of the text, in service to the argument that Alison, “transformed and transgendered”, was a prototype for Shakespeare’s Falstaff.
Turner is clearly a Wife of Bath megafan – she even admits in the acknowledgements to “discussing Chaucer over cocktails for over two decades” – and readers are assumed to have a thorough knowledge of the original text. If your last contact with Alison was at school, you might want to reread her before tackling this book. Or you might want to reread her afterwards, once you know which jokes to look out for.
Pleasingly, Turner is also a fan of modern writers making their own fun with Alison. Whether it’s Breeze’s The Wife of Bath in Brixton Market, or Smith’s 2021 play The Wife of Willesden, or a semi-hard, extra-mature cheese, the riotous, feminist, authentic Wife of Bath means something to everyone. She’s still the spiciest 600-year-old in town.
• The Wife of Bath: A Biography by Marion Turner is published by Princeton University Press (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
