The Wife of Bath's Shipman's Tale and the Invention of Chaucerian Fabliaux

Abstract

he theory that the Shipman's Tale was originally written for the Wife of Bath is generally thought to be based simply on the use of pronouns in the early portions of the tale. The present study shows that the theory is not a textual one, but rather implicated in a series of developments in medieval studies: in Chaucerianism itself, the theory is part of the transformation of traditional theories of decorum into theories concerning character 'growth and development'; it depends also, and less obviously, on the creation of the genre of the fabliau by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French anthologists.

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