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Electronic
Canterbury Tales - Kankedort.Net Index Page
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The Canterbury
Tales in Middle English
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The Canterbury
Tales in Translation
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General
Historical & Cultural Backgrounds
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Sources,
Analogues, & Related Texts
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Online Notes &
Commentary
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Online Articles
& Books
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Student Projects
& Essays
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Online
Bibliography
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Syllabi & Course
Descriptions
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Images &
Multimedia
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Audio Files &
Language Helps
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Potpourri
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Additional
Resources
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Scholar's
Dozen
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What's New? Recent Additions to the ECT
Web Resources by Tale
Electronic
Canterbury Tales - Kankedort.Net Index Page
Fragment I / Group A
The General Prologue
The Knight's Tale
The Miller's Prologue &
Tale
The Reeve's Prologue & Tale
The Cook's Prologue & Tale
Fragment II / Group B1
The Man of Law's
Introduction, Prologue, Tale, & Epilogue
Fragment III /
Group D
The Wife of Bath's
Prologue & Tale
The Friar's Prologue & Tale
The Summoner's
Prologue
& Tale
Fragment IV /
Group E
The
Clerk's Prologue & Tale
The Merchant's Prologue,
Tale, & Epilogue
Fragment V / Group F
The
Squire's Introduction & Tale
The Franklin's
Prologue
& Tale
Fragment VI /
Group C
The Physician's Tale
The Pardoner's Introduction,
Prologue, & Tale
Fragment VII /
Group B2
The Shipman's Tale
The Prioress's Prologue
& Tale
The
Prologue & Tale
of Sir Thopas
The Tale of Melibee
The Monk's Prologue & Tale
The Nun's Priest's Prologue,
Tale, & Epilogue
Fragment VIII /
Group G
The
Second Nun's Prologue & Tale
The Canon's Yeoman's
Prologue & Tale
Fragment IX /
Group H
The Manciple's
Prologue & Tale
Fragment X /
Group I
The Parson's Prologue
& Tale
The Retraction
The Electronic Canterbury Tales:
Troilus
and Criseyde
Marilyn Desmond's New Study on
the Ethics of Erotic Violence in the Wife of Bath
Hear the Wife's Prologue
and Tale read by an expert medievalist
The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale CD: From The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer Read by Elizabeth Salter
Margery Kempe wrote the first
autobiography in English (c. 1436-38)
And her life story makes the Wife of Bath look
tame.
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An Online Compendium and Companion
to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
The
Wife of Bath's Tale
 Here's the famous portrait of the Wife of Bath from the
Ellesmere Manuscript (Huntington Library, San Marino, California)
1. In Middle English
The Wife
of Bath's Prologue and the Wife
of Bath's Tale at the UVa Electronic Text Center.
Read the
Wife of Bath's Tale in the context of Fragment
III - Group D.
Read the Wife of Bath's
Prologue and Tale according to the Hengwrt ms (Hg), one of the two most important
early manuscripts, at the University of Toronto's Representative Poetry On-line
site. The Ellesmere ms (El) is the other important early edition.
Read
the Wife of Bath's
Prologue in parallel Middle English and Modern English texts at Paul Halsall's
IMSB.
The Canterbury Tales Project (Peter Robinson, U of Birmingham) has
generously made available a series of articles and working papers
describing the CTProject in detail, including the following:
- From The Canterbury Tales Project:
Occasional Papers, Volume 1, ed. Norman Blake and Peter Robinson
(Oxford: Office for Humanities Communication, 1993):
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From The Canterbury
Tales Project: Occasional Papers, Volume 2, ed. Norman Blake and
Peter Robinson (Oxford: Office for Humanities Communication, 1997):
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Beverly Kennedy:
"Contradictory Responses to the Wife of Bath as evidenced by
Fifteenth-Century Manuscript Variants" (pp. 23-39)
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Peter Robinson:
"A Stemmatic Analysis of the Fifteenth-Century Witnesses to
The Wife of Bath's Prologue" (pp. 69-132)
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Elizabeth Solopova:
"The Problem of Authorial Variants in The Wife of Bath's
Prologue" (pp. 133-142)
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From the Canterbury Tales
Project CDs:
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Peter Robinson, "Editor's
Introduction, "The Wife of Bath's Prologue on CD-ROM,
ed. Peter Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996).
2. In Modern English Translation
Scott
Gettman's edition of the Canterbury
Tales (Electronic Literature Foundation) is accessible by individual tale &
available in a variety of formats: Middle English, Modern English, Facing Page,
& Interpolated - Glossed (frames; from unknown base text).
- Although unsuitable for formal academic research, the ELF
edition is the best online version for younger readers and those unfamiliar with Middle
English. Easily navigable, and the Middle English glosses are very helpful.
The General Prologue and
Sixteen Tales have been regularized by Michael Murphy (CUNY-Brooklyn), each tale
featuring a handsome introduction. Read the Wife of
Bath's Prologue and Tale. Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.
The Litrix Reading Room translation
of the Canterbury Tales features rhyming couplets.
Sinan Kökbugur's helpfully glossed hypertext Middle English rendition of the complete Canterbury Tales is available at the Librarius page. Use the Table of
Contents in the left frame to click on a specific Tale, and difficult terms and phrases
are glossed in the lower frame.
3. Historical & Cultural Backgrounds
The Wife of Bath made three pilgrimages to Jerusalem, quite an achievement
for the time. The University of Southern Colorado, Department of History
has put together a very fine Traveling
to Jerusalem website, detailing pilgrim accounts from the 3rd century
to the present day.
See also Harold L. Osher's web exhibit Jerusalem
3000: Three Millenia of History (U of Southern Maine, Osher Map Library)
for a number of medieval and early-modern images of the holy city.
Paul Halsall's Internet Women's History
Sourcebook (IWHSB), a subset of the IMSB and Halsall's other WWW pages, provides a
wealth of material related to women's history. Of general interest is the Medieval
Europe subpage of the IWHSB and the following:
Of particular interest as a comparison to the Wife of Bath is The Book of Margery Kempe,
the memoir of a medieval woman whose breadth of experience and force of personality was as
great, if not greater than, the fictional Alice of Bath. See Lynn Staley's Introduction and edition of The Book of Margery Kempe
online at TEAMS. An
important text in a student edition made freely available on the WWW.
Mapping
Margery Kempe: A Guide to Late Medieval Material and Spiritual Life (Sarah
Stanbury and Virginia Raguin, Holy Cross) is an excellent new resource
that, in the words of the authors, provides "a
digital library of resources for studying the cultural and social matrix
of The Book of Margery Kempe. A goal of this site is to provide
access to the material culture of Kempe's 15th century world, and
especially the dynamic world of the parish. Materials at this site include
a unique and extensive database of images of East Anglian parish churches.
Other resources include the Middle English text and related devotional
writings and saints' lives; documents about daily life, politics and
commerce in 15th century Lynn; maps of pilgrimage routes; a gallery of
devotional images; and bibliography and guides for teaching."
See especially:
See also Aniinna Jokkinen's Margery Kempe page at the Luminarium:
How is
the ideal wife supposed to conduct herself? Read the Goodman of Paris (Le
Menagier de Paris,c. 1392-94), a text roughly contemporary with Chaucer's own work, to get
some sense of the medieval "ideal."
4. Sources, Analogues, & Related Texts
Although it has not
occasioned too much commentary, the Wife of Bath's Tale is Chaucer's only
nod toward the Arthurian tradition ("In th'olde dayes of the Kyng
Arthour . . . ," D.857). There are a number of good online
sources dedicated to the Arthurian tradition. See, for example:
- The
Camelot
Project (Russell Peck, URochester) for
- The Alliterative Morte Arthure
- Annales Cambriae (Annals of Wales),
Arthurian References in (c. 960-980)
- The Avowyng of Arthur
- The Awntyrs off Arthur
- The Carle of Carlisle
- Culwch and Olwen (translated by Lady
Charlotte Guest as Kilhwch and Olwen)
- The Greene Knight
- The Jeaste of Sir Gawain
- King Arthur and King Cornwall
- The Knightly Tale of Gologras and
Gawain
- Lancelot of the Laik
- The Marriage of Sir Gawain
- Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle
- Sir Perceval of Galles
- Sir Tristrem
- Stanzaic Morte Arthur
- The Turke and Sir Gawain
- The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame
Ragnelle
- A selection of post medieval-Arthurian
literature [Tennyson, Emerson, Swinbourne and so on.]
Just for a
treat, here's the script to the famous Monty
Python and the Holy Grail, a much wiser movie than many know.
Jack
Lynch (UPennsylvania) has excerpted a portion of Jerome's Adversus Jovinianum
(Against Jovinian). This pro-virginity text, in which Jerome cites
Theofrastus, is essential to understanding the Wife and her Prologue. See also Lynch's
selected Biblical
Passages on Women and Medieval Lyrics on
Women.
Christy Desmet (UGeorgia) has excerpted a portion of "Holy Maidenhod," a treatise
on the virtues of virginity.
What would the Wife make of Andreas Capellanus's The Art
of Courtly Love?
A
thematically important concept in the Wife's tale is "gentilesse," particularly
in the "pillow speech" where the old woman instructs the reticent knight who grudgingly
married her. Read Chaucer's poem of the same name, "Gentilesse."
5. Online Notes & Commentary
Discussion and links concerning the Wife of Bath's Prologue
and the Wife of Bath's Tale
(two separate webpages) on Larry D. Benson's superlative Geoffrey Chaucer Page (Harvard). Includes
e-texts of scholarly essays, sources and ancillary texts, and capsule discussions of key
issues. Some of the items related to the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale include:
Medieval
Women Writers (Laurie Churchill, Ohio Wesleyan U) provides resources
for women writing in Latin, Occitan, & French.
The
Female Spellcaster in Middle English Romances: Heretical Outsider or
Political Insider? by Barbara A. Goodman discusses shape shifting
females in Middle English in terms that are applicable to the Hag in the
Wife's Tale. Essays in Medieval Studies 15 (1998): 45-55.
At one point in her Prologue, the Wife is interrupted by the Pardoner, who
calls her "a noble prechour in this cas" (III [D] 165), and
Claire Waters has written of Dangerous
Beauty, Beautiful Speech: Gendered Eloquence in Medieval Preaching,
Essays in Medieval Studies 14 (1997): online.
Mary
Anne Andrade (Collin County Community College District) has provided brief online
notes for her literature classes, including The Wife of
Bath and Augustinian Interpretation (notes from D.W. Robertson's famous A Preface
to Chaucer).
Dan Mosser's course syllabus, "On
the Road with the Wife of Bath and Margery Kempe" (Virginia
Tech), presents a creative blend of literary investigation and historical
inquiry and is a model for new approaches to one of Chaucer's most popular
Canterbury pilgrims.
6. Online Articles
Bloch,
R. Howard, and Frances Ferguson, eds. Misogyny, Misandry, and
Misanthropy. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft809nb586/
An
important work of gender criticism in Chaucer studies is Elaine Tuttle
Hanson's Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: U of
California P, 1992). It is available online at <http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft2s2004t2/>
through the kind ministrations of U
of California Press E-Scholarship Editions.
Contents
See Susan K. Hagen's e-text, "Reading the Wife of Bath by the Light of
Madonna or An Anachronistic Post-Modern Reading of a Post-Medieval Text"
(Birmingham Southern U).
Chaucer Sourcebook,
from the Harvard Chaucer Page, offers a number of classic and professional essays from
noted Chaucerians, including:
- George Lyman Kittredge, "Chaucer's
Discussion of Marriage," Modern Philology 9 (1911-1912): 435-67.
Perhaps one of the most important articles in all of Chaucer studies, it set the debate
concerning "the marriage group."
- David Aers, ""Chaucer: Love, Sex and
Marriage," from Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination, 1980
pp. 143-70.
- Mary Carruthers, "The Wife of Bath and
the Painting of Lions," PMLA 94 (1979): 209-22.
- All articles on the Harvard Chaucer Page reprinted by
permission.
Essays in Medieval Studies
features full-text articles from the proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association,
online version edited by Allen J. Frantzen (Loyola - Chicago), including:
R.A.
Shoaf's online postprint Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency of the Word devotes
Chapter 11 to The
Wife of Bath and the Mediation of 'Privitee'
"Hooly
Chirche," the Sacrament of Marriage, and Thematic Finalization in the
Canterbury Tales (Frederick Martin, Tulane U), from an ongoing e-project
melding critical and cultural theory & medieval studies. See Martin's
e-dissertation in progress, Pilgrimage
in the Age of Schism: Chaucer, Sociological Poetics, and the Canterbury
Tales.
Susan K. Hagen
has written Reading the
Wife of Bath by the Light of Madonna or An Anachronistic Post-Modern Reading
of a Post-Medieval Text (Birmingham Southern College).
7. Student Projects & Essays
Dominion &
Domination of the Gentle Sex: The Lives of Medieval Women (Thinkquest)
includes some oversimplification, but is a nicely done student website.
Dene
Scoggins' English 316 site
(UT Austin) explores "culture, ideology, and issues of canonicity" in the
Canterbury Tales, including a student developed page devoted to the Wife of
Bath's Prologue and Tale.
Anniina Jokkinen's Essays and Articles on Chaucer
includes a number of sample student essays, of varying quality. Like any other
source, student essays must be evaluated rigorously, cited correctly, and used
responsibly. Jokkinen also compiles a number of resources by Canterbury
Tale: The
Wife of Bath's Tale
8. Online Bibliography
An
outstanding and wide ranging database, the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship's Medieval Feminist
Index (UIowa) will lead you to a number of studies related to the Wife of Bath, her
Prologue, and her Tale.
9. Syllabi & Course
Descriptions
10. Images & Multimedia
See the
Wife of Bath's Portrait from the Ellesmere Manuscript, one of the two
earliest compilations of the Canterbury Tales (Huntington Library, San
Marino, California via Anniina Jokinen's Luminarium).
See Anniina Jokinen's excellent photo
essay, The Wife of
Bath's Prologue and Tale in Images (Luminarium).
11. Language Helps & Audio Files
Sample
audio files (.wav, .au, .aiff) from the Wife
of Bath's Tale, recorded at the 9th International Congress of the New Chaucer Society,
Trinity College, Dublin, 1994, are available from the Chaucer Studio (Paul Thomas, Brigham
Young).
12. Potpourri
Adrian
C. Barbrook, Christopher J. Howe, Norman Blake, & Peter Robinson,
"The Phylogeny of The Canterbury Tales," Nature 394
(1998) p. 839. See the reprint
from the Canterbury Tales Project. In sum the authors conclude: "From
this analysis and other evidence, we deduce that the ancestor of the whole
tradition, Chaucer’s own copy, was not a finished or fair copy, but a
working draft containing (for example) Chaucer’s own notes of passages to
be deleted or added, and alternative drafts of sections. In time, this may
lead editors to produce a radically different text of The Canterbury
Tales. These results also demonstrate the power of applying phylogenetic
techniques, and particularly split decomposition, to the study of large
numbers of different versions of sizeable texts."
13. The
Next Step
See the
The
Poor Medieval Scholar's
Electronic Bookshelf
for recommended
texts from Google Book Search& Microsoft Live Search.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar indexes
academic material but doesn't yet make all of that material
available. In most cases, you'll have to access your own
institution's electronic databases and library materials to get
the full text versions.
Because it
does not make full texts available,
at this point
Google Scholar is best used as a bibliographical
resource.
Google Book Search & Microsoft
Live Search
These projects
are also showing their growing pains, but they
make a number of (primarily) older studies related to
Chaucer and medieval literature and culture in full
text. You can
contribute to the success of this effort by informing Google
or Microsoft of any incorrect scans, missing pages, or other errors.
Only out-of-copyright books are
available in full and some of the scans are
messy. I will cross list the relevant titles
at the Electronic Canterbury Tales -
Online Books and Essays main page and at the appropriate
web page for each Canterbury Tale.
Google Custom
Search
You can search for handpicked websites related to
Chaucer and medieval culture as recommended by ECT users.
I welcome your
suggestions for suitable websites. Please be patient as
I tune the search terms.
How to Document
Print & Electronic Sources:
The Chaucer Pedagogy
Documentation Primer
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Five Scholars Present
Five Different Approaches to Understanding Chaucer's Famous Wife of Bath
Edited by Peter Beidler
Additional
Chaucer Pages in The Electronic Canterbury Tales
Chaucer the Pilgrim-Narrator & Author
Chaucer's "Orphan" Pilgrims
- Those without a Tale
The
Frame Tale, Later Continuations,
&
Chaucerian Apocrypha
Manuscripts,
Printed Editions, & Electronic Texts
Electronic
Chaucer Texts:
What's Available Online?
Chaucer
in / and Popular Culture
Troilus
and Criseyde
Documentation Primer
Chaucer Pedagogy Page
Something Extra?
Free Books!
The
Poor Medieval Scholar's Electronic Bookshelf
(no cost, older academic books,
in .pdf
form from the
Google Library Project &
Microsoft Book Search Live)
Cheap Books!
The
Electronic Canterbury Tales
Bookshop
(recommended books for the study of
Chaucer and Late-Medieval England)
The
Kankedort
Gift Shoppe
(with many serious and some silly offerings for the medievalist
in your
life)
1800flowers.com
Check out Geoffrey Chaucer
Hath a Blog, well, just because. And, no, it ain't me. And, no, I
don't get a piece of
this
either, but I like it!
Looking for Calls for Papers?
Call
for Papers database from the University of Pennsylvania CFP listserv
Build Your Chaucer & Medieval
Studies Library!
Save 50-80%
at The Electronic Canterbury Tales
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