The previous two chapters have in a sense been leading up to this one, where I consider the best-known figure in the Canterbury Tales (her extended ‘autobiographical’ ‘Prologue’ is twice as long as the tale she tells) and one who has received added attention in recent years, given the growth of a feminist critique of Chaucer's work. The debate over the Wife of Bath is a controversial one; one of the earliest modern feminist discussions of her, in Arlyn Diamond's ‘Chaucer's Women and Women's Chaucer’, views her as Chaucer's perpetuation of a medieval anti-feminist tradition, a ‘nightmare’ figure ‘compounded of masculine insecurities and female vices as seen by misogynists’ in whom Diamond is unable to ‘recognize myself, or the women I know, or have known in history’. Others have passed over the Wife's self-confessed lechery, fickleness, and deceit with less concern, and indeed the essay immediately preceding Diamond's in The Authority of Experience, by Maureen Fries, contrasts the Wife of Bath's qualities with the weakness of Chaucer's Criseyde in saluting her robust assault on patriarchal institutions like the Church, so that here Chaucer does indeed create a ‘truly practising feminist’, in Fries's phrase. Critics would now I think be more cautious about suggesting we have an either/ or choice in the matter; the Wife is partly an exemplification of medieval anti-feminism, partly a protest against it, partly a mouthpiece of carnivalesque play and opposition, partly a signal of the limits to the carnivalesque. Whether we can find any resolution to the struggle of forces that takes place in the ‘field’ of the Wife of Bath might now strike us, given what we have seen of Chaucer, as an unreasonable expectation.

Diamond need not be surprised that empirical evidence of the women she actually ‘knows’ does not substantiate Chaucer's picture of the Wife; as I remarked above, much of the Wife of Bath's autobiography, though she claims in the opening line of her ‘Prologue’ to speak out of personal ‘experience’, comes straight out of previous texts.