Essay
Literary Analysis of The Wife of Bath's Tale
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An originally written and well-researched literary analysis of The Wife of Bath's Tale from The Canterbury Tales. It provides feministic perspective of the tale.
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Page 1 of 6THE CANTERBURY TALES BY GEOFFREY CHAUCER (C. 1837-1400)
Who is Geoffrey Chaucer?
Not just a great English poet but also a courtier, civil
servant, and diplomat, Chaucer was probably born in
London around 1343. His father, a wine merchant, was keen
to advance his son’s career and secured a place for him as a
page in the Countess of Ulster’s household. From there,
Chaucer entered the service of Edward III, first as a soldier,
then as a diplomat, travelling to France and Italy, where he
would have read the works of Dante and Boccaccio. From
1374 to 1386 he held a post as controller of customs.
Chaucer married in 1366, and gained a patron – John of
Gaunt, the king’s fourth son. Chaucer wrote his first major
poem, Book of the Duchess (1369) as an elegy to Gaunt’s first wife, Blanche. He fell on hard times
during Richard II’s reign; however, in 1389 was appointed clerk of the king’s royal building
projects. He died in 1400 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Other key works
1379 The House of Fame
c.1385 Troilus and Criseyde
c.1388 The Legend of Good Women
The Middle English Literature (c. 1387-1400)
The Middle Ages designates the time span roughly from the collapse of the Roman Empire
to the Renaissance and Reformation. The adjective “medieval,” coined from Latin medium
(middle) and aevum (age), refers to whatever was made, written, or thought during the Middle
Ages. The Renaissance was so named by nineteenth-century historians and critics because they
associated it with an outburst of creativity attributed to a “rebirth” or revival of Latin and,
especially, of Greek learning and literature. The word “Reformation” designates the powerful
religious movement that began in the early sixteenth century and repudiated the supreme authority
of the Roman Catholic Church. The Renaissance was seen as spreading from Italy in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries to the rest of Europe, whereas the Reformation began in Germany and
quickly affected all of Europe to a greater or lesser degree. The very idea of a renaissance or rebirth,
however, implies something dormant or lacking in the preceding era. More recently, there have
been two non-exclusive tendencies in our understanding of the medieval period and what follows.
Some scholars emphasize the continuities between the Middle Ages and the later time now
often called the Early Modern Period. Others emphasize the ways in which sixteenth-century
writers in some sense “created” the Middle Ages, in order to highlight what they saw as the
brilliance of their own time. Medieval authors, of course, did not think of themselves as living in
the “middle”; they sometimes expressed the idea that the world was growing old and that theirs
was a declining age, close to the end of time. Yet art, literature, and science flourished during the
Middle Ages, rooted in the Christian culture that preserved, transmitted, and transformed classical
tradition.
, Page 2 of 6
The works covered in this section of the anthology encompass a period of more than eight
hundred years, from Caedmon’s Hymn at the end of the seventh century to Everyman at the
beginning of the sixteenth. The date 1485, the year of the accession of Henry VII and the beginning
of the Tudor dynasty, is an arbitrary but convenient one to mark the “end” of the Middle Ages in
England.
Although the Roman Catholic Church provided continuity, the period was one of enormous
historical, social, and linguistic change. To emphasize these changes and the events underlying
them, the periods were divided into three primary sections: Anglo-Saxon Literature, Anglo-
Norman Literature and Middle English Literature in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. The
Anglo-Saxon invaders, who began their conquest of the southeastern part of Britain around 450,
spoke an early form of the language we now call Old English. Old English displays its kinship
with other Germanic languages (German or Dutch, for example) much more clearly than does
contemporary British and American English, of which Old English is the ancestor. As late as the
tenth century, part of an Old Saxon poem written on the Continent was transcribed and
transliterated into the West Saxon dialect of Old English without presenting problems to its English
readers. In form and content Old English literature also has much in common with other Germanic
literatures with which it shared a body of heroic as well as Christian stories. The major characters
in Beowulf are pagan Danes and Geats, and the only connection to England is an obscure allusion
to the ancestor of one of the kings of the Angles.
The changes already in progress in the language and culture of Anglo-Saxon England were
greatly accelerated by the Norman Conquest of 1066. The ascendancy of a French-speaking ruling
class had the effect of adding a vast number of French loan words to the English vocabulary. The
conquest resulted in new forms of political organization and administration, architecture, and
literary expression. In the twelfth century, through the interest of the Anglo-Normans in British
history before the Anglo-Saxon Conquest, not only England but all of Western Europe became
fascinated with a legendary hero named Arthur who makes his earliest appearances in Celtic
literature. King Arthur and his knights became a staple subject of medieval French, English, and
German literature. Selections from Latin, French, and Old Irish, as well as from Early Middle
English have been included here to give a sense of the cross-currents of languages and literatures
in Anglo-Norman England and to provide background for later English literature in all periods.
Literature in English was performed orally and written throughout the Middle Ages, but
the awareness of and pride in a uniquely English literature does not actually exist before the late
fourteenth century. In 1336, King Edward III began a war to enforce his claims to the throne of
France; the war continued intermittently for one hundred years until finally the English were driven
from all their French territories except for the port of Calais. One result of the war and these losses
was a keener sense on the part of England’s nobility of their English heritage and identity. Toward
the close of the fourteenth century English finally began to displace French as the language for
conducting business in Parliament and much official correspondence. Although the high nobility
continued to speak French by preference, they were certainly bilingual, whereas some of the earlier
Norman kings had known no English at all. It was becoming possible to obtain patronage
for literary achievement in English. The decision of Chaucer (d. 1400) to emulate French and
Italian poetry in his own vernacular is an indication of the change taking place in the status of
English, and Chaucer’s works were greatly to enhance the prestige of English as a vehicle for
literature of high ambition. He was acclaimed by fifteenth-century poets as the embellisher of the
English tongue; later writers called him the English Homer and the father of English poetry. His
friend John Gower (1330—1408) wrote long poems in French and Latin before producing his last
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