The Wife of Bath’s Marginal Authority

Abstract

C haucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue is in part a subversive supplement to Jerome’s Against Jovinian , a comic elaboration of the barely suppressed women’s voices that attend the history of academic exegesis, murmuring a perennial challenge to masculine authority. Read against exegesis on 1 Timothy 2, the Prologue reveals Chaucer’s inversion of traditions: he estranges the reader from the traditional masculine perspective, replacing it with a “feminine” point of view; and he focuses on the vices that call men’s dominion into question. Chaucer neatly turns the tables on Jerome and his fellow Latin exegetes. 1 Of course, the Prologue does not inevitably call up that intertext for all readers. Just as Chaucer supplements Jerome’s work, so do the fifteenth-century scribes who copy the work recreate it for their own cultural contexts. By adding marginal glosses to the poem, the scribes shape its meaning for their contemporaries, increasingly removed not only from Jerome but also from the immediate contexts of Chaucer’s composition. The glossing programs of fifteenth-century manuscripts yield valuable historical evidence of how Alison’s exegesis was presented, though this evidence is far from transparent. Like all paratexts, the glosses are inevitably interested, hinting at the embodied positions of their authors, and subject to interpretation. In short, the glosses are also a supplement and can potentially displace the poetic text. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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