Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Jack Heller's avatar

One of my favorite features of The Canterbury Tales appears when the pilgrims interact with one another. In The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, at least three theobros—the Friar, the Summoner, and the Pardoner—start arguing and making fun of Alison, and none of those three are paragons of virtue either (probably less virtuous than Alison). Alison’s fifth husband is a clerk of Oxford, and when the pilgrim clerk of Oxford tells his tale, he clearly has heard what Alison has had to say.

Implied but not stated explicitly in this post is that Alison is illiterate, so one source of her conflict with the three chauvinists is that they can read and she cannot. Using her experience, Allison chooses to comment on John chapter 4, Jesus’s visit with the Samaritan woman. Alison makes occasional errors about the biblical text, such as confusing Mark and John (line 145) and wondering why the Samaritan woman’s fifth husband wasn’t a husband (lines 14-22). What’s notable about these errors is that they are minor, and that they are the kinds of errors one might make if one’s encounter with the biblical text is auditory—by hearing. Taking Alison’s prologue as a whole, she has heard plenty of the Bible read, and we shouldn’t confuse illiteracy with unintelligence. Experience is Alison’s authority, but so is the word she has heard, such as when she cites the apostle Paul that it is better to marry than to burn.

(As an aside, oppressive people, including medieval chauvinists and Southern plantation owners, have erroneously believed that they control intelligence when they limit literacy.)

It's interesting to go back to the Samaritan woman story after reading The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale. Jesus gets all of the men out of the conversation because if they were present, they would probably do exactly as they do when they return—demean the woman. One to one, the woman wants her intelligence respected, so she asks her question about where is the right place to worship. Jesus answers her question by taking her question to a more interesting answer. When Jesus interacts with the Samaritan woman, his respect is love, and he gains one of the most effective evangelists within the gospels.

Expand full comment
Richard Myerscough's avatar

Who'd have thought there could be so much in it?? Certainly not the teenage me who so struggled with its Middle English all those years ago! Thank you so much, Karen, for the richness of this installment. I find myself wondering how much was intended by Chaucer as novel and perhaps even subversive in his day - for example, the focus on the sufficiency of personal experience. How much is he, as an author, wielding his (potent/potential) authority through his text? She's such a larger-than-life character that I'd have a hard time thinking he was giving us this merely by some kind of happy accident. Did the reaction to the Tales at the time it was first published recognise what he was doing in this part of the work?

Expand full comment
17 more comments...

No posts