Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale: The Woe and Bliss of Marriage
—Chaucer, Medieval Literature, and World Literature系列讲座—
Speaker: James Simpson, Research Professor, Harvard University
Moderator: Zhang Lian, Zhejiang University
Time: March 30, 2026, at 19:00 (Beijing Time)
Venue: Zoom 96614482338 Passcode: 2026
Abstract: What happens when history catches up with a given genre? What happens when the social premises of a given genre become untenable? What happens to a genre, that is, when it’s faced with a new historical challenge?
In this lecture I’ll address those larger questions by looking to the fate of chivalric romance when it meets women authors. In particular, we’ll look to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the last decade of the fourteenth century.
Chivalric romance had been the prime genre for narrative since the mid-twelfth century. French writers – notably Chretien de Troyes (fl. 1160-80) – had developed this genre in extraordinarily sophisticated ways. But the premise of chivalric romance is that the knight saves the damsel in distress. But what happens when women become authors? Does the chivalric romance model of knights saving damsels in distress survive? Does the view of happy marriage in chivalric romance survive? Does chivalric romance as a genre survive?
We can begin to answer this question with Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, since the Wife is at least imagined as a woman author, and as the imagined author, she takes very direct aim at chivalric romance. In fact she takes direct aim at the institution of marriage, and at male authorship generally. All that said, she seems at the end of her tale to collapse back into acceptance of the fantasy of chivalric romance. The rapist young knight ends up being happily married to a beautiful young wife. How is this possible?
James Simpson was educated at the University of Melbourne, with further degrees from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. He is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Research Professor of English at Harvard University, and formerly Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. His more recent books are Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (Harvard University Press, 2010); Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, co-edited by Brian Cummings (Oxford University Press, 2010); Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism (Harvard University Press, 2019); and The Oxford Chaucer, co-edited with Christopher Cannon (Oxford University Press, 2024).
