THE WIFE OF BATH, CHRISTINE DE PIZAN,AND THE MEDIEVAL CASE FOR WOMEN.*by S. H. Rigby“It’s the very finest things which are the subject of the mostintense discussion.” Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies (CL: 8). In reading medieval texts, literary scholars are frequently motivated bya desire not only to recover the original meaning of a work but also toshow how it “may continue to speak to us” today as modern readers.1However, whilst some scholars have been able to pursue both goals, inpractice, these two strategies of reading often become mutually exclu-sive “modernizing” and “historicizing” modes of interpretation. Thosecritics who emphasize how a text addresses us across the centuries thentend to focus on the modernity of the views expressed by medievalauthors and to stress the immediate relevance of medieval texts for mod-ern audiences. Alternatively, those who emphasize the historical contextof a work tend to underline the “alterity” of medieval culture and thedistance that lies between its underlying assumptions and our own val-ues and ways of thinking.2Scholars who interrogate a text in terms of itsmodern relevance are likely to be denounced by their opponents for theheresy of anachronism; those who stress a text’s alterity are, in turn, likelyto be attacked for the sin of reductionism, for presenting medieval cul-ture in terms of a monolithic, univocal dominant ideology to which alltexts necessarily conformed. A classic instance of these alternative modes of reading medieval textsis provided by critical responses to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. Indeed, if, asHelen Cooper once said, there is less of a critical consensus on whatChaucer was doing “than for any other English writer,”3then there isprobably less agreement about what he was doing in the case of the Wifeof Bath than for any other part of his work. Famously, scholars have beendivided into two irreconcilable camps. On the one hand are those criticswho argue that Chaucer intends us to take seriously the Wife’s defenceof women against their clerical detractors. Critics from a variety of oth-erwise-opposed critical paradigms, ranging from the humanist to theTHE CHAUCER REVIEW, Vol. 35, No. 2, 2000.Copyright © 2000 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA00/35/2/ 12/25/00 6:51 PM Page 133feminist, post-structuralist, and Marxist, have been able to find in theWife’s arguments a plausible defence of women against the misogamyand misogyny which were so prevalent in medieval culture. She is thuspresented as a perceptive critic of misogynist orthodoxy who beats malescholars at their own game and creates her own authoritative positionfrom which to speak in defence of her sex and to convince us of herviews. For such critics, Alisoun is a persuasive defender of the vision ofequality in marriage achieved through the surrender of male sovereigntywhich concludes both her Prologue and her Tale.4This positive assessmentof the Wife of Bath’s (and Chaucer’s) achievement tends to be qualifiedby those who adopt it only by a New Historicist pessimism about the pos-sibility of our ever entirely casting off the thought-patterns of society’sdominant ideological discourses.5It is an assessment which has provedextremely popular in an age which tends to see literature in general as a“sanctioned space for the expression of social dissidence.”6On the other hand are those critics, again drawn from a wide varietyof theoretical perspectives ranging from patristic criticism to feminism,who argue that the Wife does not provide a refutation of medieval stereo-types of women but is herself meant as the supreme embodiment andconfirmation of such stereotypes. It cannot be stressed too strongly thatthis does not mean that these critics are themselves sympathetic to thesemedieval views of women. On the contrary, this school of thoughtincludes those feminist scholars for whom Chaucer’s portrait of the Wifeis a rehearsal of the male supremacism typical of his works and ofmedieval culture in general.7In other words, there is no such thing as“the” feminist interpretation of Chaucer for us to agree or disagree withwhen feminist critics themselves have seen the Wife as an example bothof Chaucer’s sympathy with women and of his complicity with the misog-ynist culture of his day.8Here at least, one’s choice of literary interpre-tation cannot simply be read off from one’s political preferences. For this second school of critics, Chaucer means his readers to judgeAlisoun by the standards commonly applied to women in medieval cul-ture, such as those of the “perfect wife” of the book of Proverbs(31.10–31), who renders her husband “good, and not evil, all the days ofher life,” and of the “good wife” of Ecclesiasticus (26:1–4, 16–24), whofills the years of her husband’s life with peace.9That Alisoun fails to meetsuch standards is indicated by her embodiment of many of the faults ofthe harlot of Proverbs (7:10–12) (unable “to be quiet, not able to abidestill at home”), of the wives denounced in misogamous works such asMatthieu of Boulogne’s Lamentations of Matheolus (c.1295, translated fromLatin into French c. 1371 by Jehan le Fèvre),10and of the women criti-cized with monotonous regularity by medieval preachers for their vanity,lust, disobedience, and garrulity.11Alison is seen as one of those ruddy-THE CHAUCER REVIEW13400/35/2/ 12/25/00 6:51 PM Page 134S. H. RIGBY135faced Epicureans attacked by Jerome for sophistically employing scrip-tural authority to justify their own sexual incontinence: “of the scripturesthey know nothing except the texts which favour second marriages butthey love to quote the example of others to justify their own self-indul-gence.”12For such critics, the parallels between the Wife and theSamaritan woman whom Jesus met “Biside a welle” (John 4:6–42; CT, D15), both of whom had five husbands, indicate that Alisoun should beequated with the Old Law, with the flesh, and with literal understanding,rather than with the New Law and spiritual wisdom.13Far from expect-ing us to be convinced by her arguments or to take them seriously, thehumor of the Prologue lies in Chaucer’s desire to have his readers seethrough Alisoun’s defence of women as she proceeds to condemn her-self out of her own mouth.14As Scanlon points out, much of Chaucerstudies is structured around an opposition between “the complexity ofthe textual and the