496 The Wife of Bath (with Marion Turner)
The History of Literature
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The Wife of Bath's Rhetorical Power
In her prologue the wife of Bath is advocating for a very conceptually, I suppose, liberators we would think of way for women to act in the world. And she's describing all kinds of very bad behaviour and also that she partakes then kind of lying and so on to her husbands. The scribes who were writing on the manuscripts were very worried that women were going to, readers were going to think it was okay to behave like this. So they wrote things next to them essentially saying this is really wrong, she's really terrible.
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