"Allas, Allas! That Evere Love Was Synne!": John Bromyard v. Alice of Bath

Abstract

The main literary sources of the Wife of Bath's Prologue, especially those that draw upon the clerical tradition of antifeminism catalogued by Francis Lee Utley,1 have long been established, and one specific aspect of Alice's personality?the frank enjoyment she takes in the natural pleasures of sex?has commonly been traced to Jean de Meun. Charles Muscatine thought it owed something to the character of La Vielle (whose theoretic championship of animal nature is entwined with her personal recollection of animal pleasure),2 whereas for Winthrop Wetherbee Chaucer had been more influenced by de Meun's portrait of Nature (like Nature in her long plea for procreation, the Wyf displays a prodigious imaginative and intellectual energy in affirming her sexual role).3 While I have no interest in evaluating or challenging these assessments, I wish to supplement them here with a rather different kind of evidence. I will try to show that throughout the late Middle Ages, moralists attributed to popular opinion precisely the kind of views expressed by Alice of Bath, and in particular I will cite an extended passage from the English Dominican John Bromyard on this topic?a passage that reads almost as if it were a considered rebuttal of many of the ideas floated in the Wife of Bath's Prologue. As befits a woman who favors experience over authority, Alice of Bath is evidently speaking for a great many of her contemporaries when she defends sex as a natural instinct and mocks the church's censorious atti

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