In The Wife of Bath, Marion Turner sets out to write a biography of a fictional person: Alison, the eponymous character from the Canterbury Tales who's been entertaining readers with her independent forthrightness since the fourteenth century. In the first half of the book, Turner looks at how women like the active Alison were far from an improbability in the Middle Ages; in the second half, she looks at the Wife's afterlife as she's been referenced and reworked by later writers.

There are some interesting points made here, and I can't say that Turner doesn't know her Chaucer. (I'd recommend having at least a passing familiarity with Canterbury Tales before picking this up, because she does assume that you've read it, too.) But she's sometimes on shakier ground when it comes to her historical analysis. For much of her discussion of the European Marriage Pattern (a slightly more contentious academic argument than she presents it here), the endnotes show that she's relying largely on one book which is about the Netherlands rather than England. There's no excuse for anyone in the 2020s to still be making the mistake of thinking that "Trotula" is the name of a woman rather than of a text.

Reading this was also a reminder for me of why I'm a historian and not a lit scholar. A number of the specific connections she argues for here between texts and authors struck me as tenuous—the Shakespeare one in particular. That said, I did find the last part of the book, where she looks at how Black women writers in particular have drawn on the figure of the Wife of Bath, to be very interesting.

While still written in an academic mode, I think this should be accessible for most general readers—it's dry, but doesn't have much jargon in it. ( )

Characters in the Canterbury Tales are not meant to be real. The Knight has traveled too far and is too duty-bound. The Parson is too devoted to his moral viewpoint. The Miller is too much the rogue. The Pardoner is too much... well, too much something, even if it's not clear what.

Is Alison, the Wife of Bath, an exception? This book can't prove that Chaucer meant her to be like a real person -- but certainly it proves that a lot of people since Chaucer's time have thought that she is.

Most of those more recent writers, sadly, have been men trying to condemn what Alison was: A woman of independent means who liked sex and liked having her way. Given that those last two items apply to, oh, at least 100% of the men who have criticized her, I think the Wife has a lot more legs to stand on than her critics. The roll of authors who have toned her down (Dryden), tried to get into arguments with her (the scribe of MS. British Library Egerton 2864, who scribbled glosses all over her words as if showing his bigotry somehow made her any less effective a character), rewrote her (Pasolini's movie version of the Tales) is long and depressing. Until recent years, it seems as if only one author (the writer of the repeatedly-suppressed broadside ballad "The Wanton Wife of Bath," which lets Alison into heaven) had any sympathy for her. It's really depressing -- at least for someone who, like author Turner and like me, thinks the Wife is actually someone interesting and worthy in her own right. You don't have to agree with the Wife entirely to understand that she was rebelling against a system that was far worse than the system she wanted to replace it with.

Turner's book has a somewhat chronological pattern: First, an examination of Chaucer's own time, in which women -- although still denied most rights -- were able to exercise an independence largely denied them both before and after. Alison's existence as a woman of independent means was most possible from the time of the Black Death until the coming of the Tudors, and Turner shows how this was so. Then comes the Period of Condemnation, when all those misogynist men try to have their revenge on her (without much luck, since Alison is still around and who knows the names of any of those who condemned her?). Then a sort of era of redemption, as feminists have discovered in Alison a fourteenth century forerunner.

This, sadly, strikes me as a depressingly mixed bag. I think Turner could have done more with Chaucer's feminism -- yes, by today's standards, he was arguably a bit prejudiced against women, but by fourteenth century standards, he might as well have been Gloria Steinem. If Chaucer had lived today, I think he would be a genuine no-reservations-at-all feminist.

Too, I think Turner tries much, much too hard to link Chaucer to Shakespeare. Of course Shakespeare knew Chaucer 's writings-- he based two plays (Troilus and Cressida and The Two Noble Kinsmen) directly on Chaucer stories. Chaucer was probably Shakespeare's most important literary source (as opposed to pseudo-historical sources like Holinshed). But Shakespeare did not really use Chaucer well -- both Shakespeare plays based on Chaucer are clearly inferior to their sources, and can you think of a single other instance where Shakespeare is inferior to his source?

Also, while it is perhaps relevant that moderns are trying to bring the Wife of Bath into our world, I just don't think it works. Alison is a medieval woman, and there is nothing wrong with that. A modern woman is not -- cannot be -- the Wife of Bath. She might be inspired by the Wife, she might admire the Wife, but she is not the Wife. Maybe I'm prejudiced in my own way, but I'd rather hear Alison tell her own story than hear about these modern retellings. This is a good work of documenting Alison's history. But, in the end, I don't feel as if I know Alison any better. And it is Alison I want to know, not her modern reflections. ( )