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The Wife Of Bath And The Scholastic Concept Of Operatio, Joseph E. Grennen
The Wife Of Bath And The Scholastic Concept Of Operatio, Joseph E. Grennen
Quidditas
The loathly lady of Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale delivers a lecture to her reluctant swain which is remarkably gracious and persuasive, although hardly unconventional. Her sentiments, which find a parallel in Dante's Convivio, may be summed up in a phrase: Virtue is the true nobility. True virtue, furthermore, is a legacy from Christ, not an inheritance passed on with titles and wealth. The chief difficulty facing a reader is to find a way of reconciling this view with the cynical, maverick personality established for Alice of Bath in her own prologue. We might suppose that Chaucer is here …