496 The Wife of Bath (with Marion Turner)
The History of Literature
00:00
The Wife of Bath - Is She Ordinary?
The wife of Bath is a great example of when an author takes sources and traditions and then turns them into something else entirely. She is, as I say, the first ordinary woman in English literature. So she's neither perfect nor absolutely damnable. And she comes from the kind of middling area of society that many people could identify with - even if they can't identify with saints or prostitutes.
Transcript
Play full episode
