The Wife of Bath, Christine de Pizan, and the Medieval Case for Women

Abstract

In reading medieval texts, literary scholars are frequently motivated by a desire not only to recover the original meaning of a work but also to show how it “may continue to speak to us” today as modern readers.1 However, whilst some scholars have been able to pursue both goals, in practice, these two strategies of reading often become mutually exclusive “modernizing” and “historicizing” modes of interpretation. Those critics who emphasize how a text addresses us across the centuries then tend to focus on the modernity of the views expressed by medieval authors and to stress the immediate relevance of medieval texts for modern audiences. Alternatively, those who emphasize the historical context of a work tend to underline the “alterity” of medieval culture and the distance that lies between its underlying assumptions and our own values and ways of thinking.2 Scholars who interrogate a text in terms of its modern relevance are likely to be denounced by their opponents for the heresy of anachronism; those who stress a text’s alterity are, in turn, likely to be attacked for the sin of reductionism, for presenting medieval culture in terms of a monolithic, univocal dominant ideology to which all texts necessarily conformed. A classic instance of these alternative modes of reading medieval texts is provided by critical responses to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. Indeed, if, as Helen Cooper once said, there is less of a critical consensus on what Chaucer was doing “than for any other English writer,”3 then there is probably less agreement about what he was doing in the case of the Wife of Bath than for any other part of his work. Famously, scholars have been divided into two irreconcilable camps. On the one hand are those critics who argue that Chaucer intends us to take seriously the Wife’s defence of women against their clerical detractors. Critics from a variety of otherwise-opposed critical paradigms, ranging from the humanist to the