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1. Background:
   1. Chaucer's Life: from middle class and not a cleric, but a member of government and court.
   2. Five Historical incidents affecting his life and writings:
      1. Thomas à Becket, abp. 1161, whose cult developed the Canterbury pilgrimage
      2. The Black Death, 1348 and 1368; victim Duchess Blaunche, wife of John of Gaunt (Chaucer‚s Book of the Duchess)
      3. Richard II, succeeded grandfather Edward III in 1377, deposed in 1399 by Henry IV
      4. English Rising (Peasants‚ Revolt), 1381
      5. The Great Schism, 1378 until 1417
2. The Canterbury Tales
   1. The frame
      1. Pilgrimage, to Becket‚s shrine. great societal mixer
      2. Keyword: "to quite" = requite, answer, respond to other‚s person, tale, moral, attitude, and life.
      3. Ten fragments or groups of tales, of which Group D contains tales by Wife of Bath, Friar, and Summoner.
   2. Chaucer's Wife of Bath in The Canterbury Tales
      1. In the General Prologue
         1. Fabricated realistic/fictional textile-making who weaves her life and story, the old desirous Eve. She is the middle-class propertied artisan demanding notice and voice.
         2. Flamboyant, compelling, often referred to and gingerly or hostilely responded to by the other pilgrims: she provokes excited interjections of Pardoner and Friar, but is deferred to as an authority by both Clerk and Merchant.
      2. In her Prologue
         1. Just as there is a long tradition of Arthurian legend, so even longer tradition of the antifeminist stereotypes of the lascivious Eve, earthy harridan, man-eating widow. Chaucer takes stereotypes inherited from male classical and clerical writers, all represented by Jankyn's Book of Wicked Wives (p. 69, lines 712ff) and not only makes her real but also appropriates their very arguments to create her textual self.
         2. Literal vs. allegorical interpretation, experience vs. clerical authorities.
         3. Poignant remarks about passing of youth, no glossing that literal truth (p. 60, lines 474-79)
         4. Wins control at a high price: battered but not beaten.
      3. In her Arthurian Tale
         1. Chaucer‚s artistic reworking of widespread tale: tightening of structure, realism, use of the deft touch, and rhetorical additions of debate. Arthurian: amalgam incorporating Celtic pagan and Christian England, in which friars displace elves
         2. The Rapist-knight, added to story by Chaucer, condemned to death "peradventure swich was the statut tho," but spared by feminine mercy of the queen and her court.
         3. The tale represents the romantic fantasy of the teller, who would love to be young and fresh and fair again, with a newly converted knight-husband

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