796 Marion Turner and The Wife of Bath (Revisited)

Summary

Podcast Summary: The History of Literature, Ep. 796 - Marion Turner and The Wife of Bath (Revisited)
Host: Jacke Wilson
Guest: Professor Marion Turner
Release Date: April 27, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this lively and insightful episode, host Jacke Wilson revisits a conversation with Dr. Marion Turner, JRR Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at Oxford. The main theme centers on Turner’s acclaimed book, The Wife of Bath: A Biography, which not only delves into Geoffrey Chaucer’s most famous Canterbury Tale character, but also traces how "the Wife" has traversed centuries, cultures, and literary forms. Together, Wilson and Turner explore the lasting appeal, origins, and cultural legacy of this vibrant, controversial, and groundbreaking figure in English literature.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Chaucer and His Innovations

• Early Fascination (07:13 - 07:41)
  Professor Turner shares how her interest in Chaucer began in high school but deepened at university, as she discovered his works to be both surprisingly modern and intellectually advanced for the 14th century.

• Innovation and Influence (07:52 – 10:59)
  Turner emphasizes that while originality wasn’t valued in Chaucer’s era as it is now, Chaucer’s innovation came from how he transformed sources, introduced new poetic forms (such as iambic pentameter), and experimented with literary character and genre.

  “A lot of the things that we think are new ideas … are recycling older ideas. … Chaucer, writing in the 14th century, was writing about things which we would think of as the death of the author, … experimenting so much with literary form, … new ways of thinking about character.”
  — Prof. Marion Turner [07:52]

• International Inspiration (11:25 – 13:53)
  The host and guest discuss Chaucer’s exposure to Italian poets such as Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante, which inspired him to push English poetry in new directions.

The Wife of Bath: Character and Origins

• Breaking Stereotypes (14:19 – 18:18)
  Turner argues the Wife of Bath is the first ordinary woman in English literature, distinct from prior female stereotypes (virgins, witches, prostitutes). She describes the Wife as middle-aged, middle-class, sexually frank, employed, and complex—“neither perfect nor absolutely damnable.”

  “She comes from the kind of middling area of society that many people could identify with in a way that they can’t identify with … a saint or a prostitute or a witch.”
  — Prof. Marion Turner [15:18]

• Literary Sources and Transformation (15:18 – 18:18)
  The character draws on figures like La Vieille from the Romance of the Rose but is transformed by Chaucer into something more complex, humorous, and ethical.

Reception and Legacy

• Immediate Impact (18:51 – 21:48)
  From the very beginning, the Wife of Bath stood out. Chaucer himself gave her a unique narrative space and referenced her in later works, which he didn’t do with any other character.

  • Scribes in the 15th century wrote extensive marginalia (e.g., biblical counterarguments) next to her prologue, showing fascination and concern.

  “Right from that very initial moment of writing, we can see that the Wife of Bath is different from Chaucer’s other characters.”
  — Prof. Marion Turner [18:53]

Inspiration and Historical Context

• Was She Real? (22:52 – 27:16)
  Turner addresses whether the Wife was based on a real woman. She argues the character is not based on any specific individual but is a literary creation rooted in Chaucer’s observation of the real opportunities and social roles available to women in 14th-century England.

  “She’s still rooted in her own historical moment, which was such a fascinating historical moment.”
  — Prof. Marion Turner [23:15]

  • Chaucer’s life was filled with formidable women: his property-owning mother, salaried wife, educated daughter, and powerful female employers.

Comparing to Modern Media

• The Elaine Benes Comparison (27:37 – 28:33)
  Wilson draws a parallel to the TV character Elaine from Seinfeld, noting how the Wife felt like a “real and three-dimensional” revelation to contemporary audiences—much as Elaine did to 1990s viewers.

• The Shock of Female Voices (28:33 – 29:05)
  Turner references Zadie Smith’s line:

  “The shock never ends when women say things usually said by men.”
  — Prof. Marion Turner, quoting Zadie Smith [28:33]

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Writing a Biography of a Fictional Character

• Turner’s Approach (32:08 – 35:31)
  Instead of a standard analysis, Turner chose biography to explore both the internal world of the Wife of Bath and the history of real women. The structure enabled stories of multiply married women, working women, traveling women, and female storytellers—blending close reading with socio-historical context.

  • Inspiration drawn from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: crossing time, gender, and textual boundaries.

  “Having this very specific focus, but having a very wide lens because she went … into so many authors, texts. And it allowed me then to think about the medieval across time and right up to the modern day.”
  — Prof. Marion Turner [34:55]

• Comparisons to Other Literary Archetypes (35:32 – 36:45)
  The Wife of Bath is unique among recurring figures; unlike mythic figures such as Robin Hood or Cleopatra, she is both ordinary and deeply individualized—originating from a single author but adopted widely.

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The Myth of Historical Progress

• Not a March Toward Enlightenment (37:17 – 41:19)
  Turner rebuts the idea that reactions to the Wife of Bath show simple social progress:

  • In the 14th century, her explicitness about sex was accepted.
  • The 18th century censored her (notably Alexander Pope’s bowdlerized version).
  • The 20th century, especially in the 1970s, sometimes displayed even more misogyny. Example: Pasolini’s film adaptation presents her as monstrous and literally deadly.

  “The most misogynistic examples that I found of responses to the Wife of Bath did come in the 20th century … This real discomfort from some male authors or directors with the idea of middle aged female sexuality.”
  — Prof. Marion Turner [37:31]

• Recent Positive Developments (40:00 – 41:19)
  More diverse authorship, especially women, in the last 20 years has led to richer, more nuanced interpretations.

Manuscript Reception and "Analog Social Media"

• Marginalia as Response (41:19 – 43:26)
  Scribes would fill the margins with biblical opposition to the Wife’s words—Turner points out the irony when a scribe misquotes the Bible to make his case against women’s voices.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Chaucer’s Experimentation:

  “He is, as I say, the first ordinary woman in English literature.”
  — Prof. Marion Turner [14:19]

• On Misogyny and Middle-Aged Women:

  “This real discomfort from some male authors or directors … with the idea of middle aged female sexuality. That’s something that was very much alive in the 70s and, of course, is very much alive today.”
  — Prof. Marion Turner [39:00]

• On Writing Historical Women:

  “The Ordinary Woman is still such a difficult area of historical and of literary research. … That opportunity to speak to someone whose voice is not so much recorded elsewhere would be an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. Sorry, Geoffrey.”
  — Prof. Marion Turner [44:59]

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Notable Segment Timestamps

• Marion Turner's Chaucer Origin Story: [07:01 – 07:41]
• Wife of Bath as Literary Breakthrough: [14:19 – 18:18]
• First Evidence of the Wife’s Impact: [18:51 – 21:48]
• Chaucer’s Real-Life Female Influences: [22:52 – 27:16]
• Discussion of Biographical Approach: [32:08 – 35:31]
• Analysis of Reception through Centuries: [37:17 – 41:19]
• Marginalia and Manuscript Culture: [41:19 – 43:26]
• Hypothetical Question: Chaucer or the Ordinary Woman?: [44:01 – 46:35]

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Tone & Style

The conversation is warm, enthusiastic, and intellectually curious. Jacke Wilson’s approach is that of an interested amateur—engaged, sometimes humorous, and always respectful—while Professor Turner is erudite, clear, and passionate about both scholarly detail and the wider cultural relevance of literature.

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Conclusion

This episode provides a fascinating lens on how a literary character can become much larger than her original text, embodying shifting attitudes about gender, power, and social roles. Turner encourages us to see the Wife of Bath not only as Chaucer’s creation but as a mirror for the aspirations, fears, and voices of real women across centuries. Her parting thought: the greatest untold stories belong not to the famous, but to the “ordinary women” so rarely given voice in history.

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Recommended for:

• Canterbury Tales fans
• Scholars and students of medieval literature
• Readers interested in women’s history and literary archetypes
• Anyone fascinated by how stories outgrow their authors and root themselves in culture

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Transcript

[Jack Wilson]

The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglomerate Network and LitHub Radio.

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[Jack Wilson]

Hello, this is Jack.

[Interviewer]

Emma and I are getting ready for

[Jack Wilson]

our History of Literature Podcast tour, so we're replaying the episodes with some people who are joining us for the tour as special guests. This week we feature Marion Turner, who will be meeting our group in Oxford. Marian is a wonderful scholar who specializes in Chaucer. She was kind enough to appear twice on the podcast and I'm looking forward to meeting her in real life. Today we present a conversation with Marion from back in episode 496. I hope you enjoy

[Interviewer]

Hello.

[Jack Wilson]

In talking about our guest today, author Zadie Smith wrote, quote, marion Turner is a wonderful Chaucer scholar, able to convey the fascination of his works and world over the great distance of 600 years. As we might expect, Marion Turner, scholar and expert in the works and world of Geoffrey Chaucer, has written a book about Chaucer. What's perhaps less expected is that she went on to write another book, a biography of Chaucer's most enduring creation, the Wife of Bath. Alison of Bath is one of those Rare figures who emerge from the pages of their works and become something larger in the culture of a prototype of sorts, available for claiming by everyone from 17th century balladeers to Polish communists and postcolonial black British women writers. She's been discussed and denounced, admired and allegorized, censored and celebrated for 600 years. But why? And what can we learn from her travels and treatment? We'll talk to Marion Turner about her book, the Wife of A Biography Today on the history of literature. Okay, here we go.

[Interviewer]

This is a fun one.

[Jack Wilson]

Our entree into the world of Chaucer, coming at that 14th century poetry through a 21st century angle. And a different kind of angle too, coming at him through his character, the Wife of Bath. So here's a quick recap for those of you not as immersed in the Canterbury Tales as Professor Turner. Chaucer was born in London sometime in the 1340s and died there in 1400, somewhere in his mid-50s. He is sometimes called the father of English literature or the father of English poetry. And we're going to save his full biography for an upcoming episode. Our focus today is his work, The Canterbury Tales, 24 stories written in Middle English, fairly long stories, more than 17,000 lines. The conceit is that a group of pilgrims who are on their way from London to Canterbury, where they intend to visit the cathedral holding The Shrine of St Thomas Becket, hold a storytelling contest on their way. And from that clothesline, the stories hang like a couple of dozen garments. We hear from a knight, a miller, a cook, a physician, a squire, and so on. If this reminds you of Boccaccio and the Decameron, you have identified the work in Italian that came about 20 years before this one was begun. Chaucer not only had access to Boccaccio's work, he read Petrarch and Dante, and some scholars think he may have met Boccaccio or Petrarch. Chaucer's plan was to write many more of these tales, 120 of them, four each by 30 characters. Two stories told on the way there and two on the way back. He didn't finish the plan, but what he left us was enough to make him revered throughout the centuries. And the best known of all of these tales, and maybe has always been the best known, is the one of the Wife of Bath. Striking for delivering in the first person the point of view of a woman. A clever, observant or worldly woman who speaks in a period of shifting mores and a male dominated world. Something about her and her story Clicked. Something has led to her being as famous as the work itself and at times, seemingly even more so. We'll ask our guest why that is Marion Turner after this. Okay.

[Interviewer]

Joining me now is Marion Turner, who is the JRR Tolkien professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford.

[Jack Wilson]

Whoa.

[Interviewer]

It must feel a bit like wearing David Beckham's number, I would guess. She's an academic authority on Geoffrey Chaucer and has written several books, including Chaucer A European Life.

[Jack Wilson]

She's here today to discuss her book,

[Interviewer]

the Wife of a biography, Marion Turner.

[Jack Wilson]

Welcome to the History of Literature.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Thank you so much for having me on the show.

[Interviewer]

So let's start with your interest in Chaucer. I'm curious as to when that took root.

[Jack Wilson]

Was that before university that you discovered

[Interviewer]

him, or while you were studying, or

[Jack Wilson]

how did that happen?

[Professor Marion Turner]

I did discover him before university. So in those days, everyone who studied English literature to a high level at school, at high school in England, would study Chaucer. And I liked it a lot. And I read more around the particular tales that we were studying, but it wasn't my, you know, my main passion at that point. And I think that real fascination for Chaucer did develop more when I was at university, definitely.

[Interviewer]

Was it his poetry that you were responding to or his era, or were you able to identify what it was

[Jack Wilson]

that drew you to him and his poetry?

[Professor Marion Turner]

So I think it was largely the surprise of what he was doing. So many aspects of Chaucer when you first read them, for many of us, our immediate feeling is, wow, that's so modern. But of course it's not. It's because we think things are modern that are not that. In fact, you know, a lot of the things that we think are new ideas and new thoughts in the 20th or 21st century are recycling older ideas. And so I became really fascinated by the fact that this poet, writing in the 14th century, was writing about things which we would think of as the death of the author. For example, the power of literary texts on readers was experimenting so much with literary form, was developing new ways of thinking about character, so that he was doing so many things which I think I, as a young scholar, at that point, had just not known, were being thought about intellectually in the 14th century. And that really hooked me in.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah, right.

[Interviewer]

That's so interesting, because I always feel that when I read contemporary authors who will have some almost like a gimmick, and I always think, well, it's gotta be the gimmick. Plus, because just coming up with the idea is not necessarily that interesting or innovative. And in fact, every author who sat down has probably thought about it at one point or another. Oh, what if I wrote a whole novel without using the letter E, for example, or something like that? Okay, so you have that idea, but the idea alone isn't enough. And as you're suggesting here, we are Chaucer. For a lot of people, that might be the earliest author they ever read, and things that they might think are. Are new or novel are actually in Chaucer.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that one interesting aspect of what you're just saying about that idea about originality is that on the one hand, originality itself wasn't prized a few hundred years ago the way it is now. You know, authors were thought of as needing to be original. So that someone like Chaucer is using a lot of sources in great detail. You know, most. He's not making up the stories usually. He's usually getting those from other sources. However, he is being extraordinarily innovative and original in the way that he treats those stories, what he does with them, the way he uses language, the way he crafts the stories, and with things such as his development of completely new poetic forms in English, for example, his use of new forms, new genres, the fact that he is the person that invents something like the iambic pentameter, which becomes the building block of English poetry. So the 10 syllable, five stress line, which was refined and polished later, but he's the first one to use it. He gets that from an Italian poetic line that he develops. And so that kind of example, where we see the way someone is both rooted in traditions and in the poetry that's around them, but also is able to do new things for themselves.

[Interviewer]

Do we know enough about him and his life to know where that spark or that desire came from, was an artist's idea of wanting to be new and shock people and make his verse different? Or do we know if this fit his personality or if it was just,

[Jack Wilson]

did it help his poetry sell better?

[Professor Marion Turner]

Or definitely wasn't that as far as we know, he never made a penny from his poetry. You know, he didn't make money from his poetry at all. I mean, we know a huge amount about Chaucer. As you will see in my biography, Chaucer, European Life. We do. We have this huge, you know, hundreds and hundreds of life records. And that is partly because my country is very bureaucratic, very good at keeping records. And he was a civil servant, so we have tons and tons of records. You know, when he. When he traveled abroad, we know how long he was away for and how long it took because he was paid by the day. And we have all those records, you know, for instance, so we have wonderfully rich life records. I mean, I think that when we're thinking about any individual, but maybe particularly in this. In this area of thinking about an artist, there's always a lacuna, there's always a mystery, isn't there, about how a genius is able to write in the way that they do? It isn't something that we can break down into a. Because of this. Therefore, they wrote this extraordinary work. If we could do it by numbers, then everyone would do it. But I think that in terms of your specific question about why might he have embarked on this very novel, experimental kind of writing? I think one of the main things I would point to is that unlike the people and the authors that surrounded him, Chaussin knew Italian. And he'd probably picked that up because he was a merchant's son living in London, where there were lots and lots of immigrants, traders, bankers coming in. He lived very much in that trading world. And then when he became attached to the court, he was chosen to go on diplomatic missions to Italy. And he went there at least twice, riding to Italy in the 1370s. And so he then encountered the poetry of Dante, of Petrarch, of Boccaccio, the people that had been pioneering all kinds of things in Tuscan, so in the vernacular Italian language. And he had access, more access to those texts than the other people who surrounded him did because of his language knowledge. And I think that was a particular spark, a particular inspiration for him to think, well, what can I do with English? Look at these new things that are being done in Italian. And that, I think, was a real kind of creative prompt for him then to go off on really experimental journeys in his own poetic life.

[Jack Wilson]

Right.

[Interviewer]

And then once you're in that mindset of, I can take something that I see is working over here and I can apply it in this realm over here, it almost seems like it would help open him up to do the things that he did. In terms of, for example, having a character who was unlike any who had appeared before.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yes, absolutely. And so the Wife of Bath is a great example of when an author takes sources and traditions and then turns them into something else entirely. Because, of course, there are lots of literary characters that lie behind the Wife of Bath. But as I argue in my book, she is quite different from those sources. She is, as I say, the first ordinary woman in English literature. She hasn't come out of nowhere, but she is. So I could. I can talk a bit about how, How Chaucer changes those. Those sources and what he. And what he does, if you'd like.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. So the, the previous examples, I think you list a few of them. Virginal princess or queen and, and nun or witch, sorceress, damsel in distress. Those are all kind of types that we might have seen before. But what was she like? How was she different from those or allegories or the other servants, things like that?

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah, absolutely. And so in general, I would say that the majority of characters in literature and English before the Wife of Bath, the majority of female characters had fallen into either the good women who were virgins, marriageable daughters, princesses, nuns, saints, or the bad women who were prostitutes, procuresses, old witches, old crones, those kinds of figures. So the Wife of Bath, when I say she's ordinary, I mean, for instance, she is middle aged, she's what we would think of as middle class. She has a job, she has sexual desires, she talks about those sexual desires. She goes on holiday, you know, she travels, she talks to her friend, she drinks a bit too much. She's problematic in tons of ways. You know, she's. She does lots of things that many people would find, you know, appalling, unpleasant, difficult, while also being funny and interesting and self aware. So she's. She's a mixed character. You know, she's neither perfect nor absolutely damnable. And she comes from the kind of middling area of society that many people could identify with in a way that they can't identify with, you know, a saint or a prostitute or. Or a witch. So in those ways, she's an ordinary woman. She's a woman who can speak more for others. At the same time, she is drawing on sources. And one of the main sources that Chaucer was drawing on was a figure called Lavielle from the Romance of the Rose. So this is a 12th and 13th century French text that was one of the most influential texts in medieval Europe, you know, hugely influential. Now, Lavielle is indeed that type figure of the old prostitute procuress. Chaucer takes many of many of the aspects of Lavielle and then transforms them. So while Lavielle is a socially marginal figure, as someone who's been a prostitute, who is procuring women for men, the wife of birth is essentially respectable. I mean, she talks a lot about sexual cheeky, but she's a married woman. She's been married five times and she has not been doing things that are outside the normal bounds of society. Women did often get married lots of times then, and compared to Lavielle. So lavielle is a. Is a very cynical and monstrous old woman. And while the Wife of Bath takes lots of her lines, she then adds a lot to them. You know, she's so much funnier. She's so much more self aware. She thinks much more about time. She has hope for the future. And she has an ethical sense which comes across in both her prologue and her tale, which Lavielle absolutely lacks. So Chaucer has taken a real stereotype, socially transformed it, but also transformed that stereotype into a much fuller and more complex figure.

[Interviewer]

When did readers start responding to her in particular? And I should say that I think, think I don't know what things are like in the world of Chaucer studies, but among the general public, I think the Wife of Beth is so anthologized, it almost seems fair to say that she's as famous as the tales themselves. Yeah, she probably outnumbers all the other excerpts. Them combined is probably fewer than the number of times the Wife of Bath is anthologized. So did that happen right away? Was she an immediate hit with readers of poetry and other scholarships?

[Jack Wilson]

We can see,

[Professor Marion Turner]

yes, essentially. So right from the very start, if we think about the very first reader, the very first reader, of course, was Chaucer himself. And it's clear that the Wife of Bath interested Chaucer in a way that other characters did not. So he gives her much, much more to say about her own life, about her own subjectivity. You know, he allows us much more access into her sense of self, you know, so really that is where he starts experimenting with what a literary character can be and is. He then puts her into other Canterbury Tales. So she's referred to in other Canterbury Tales. And in one, you know, we see her in the wrong level of the tale, where the characters within a tale are referring to the wife of Bath, who is outside that, who should be in the world of the tellers. So she kind of crosses levels of literature. And then in one of Chaucer's short poems, he refers to the wife of Bath, so telling his friends to read the Wife of Bath. He doesn't do that. Chaucer doesn't do that with any of his other characters. He doesn't allow them to get outside of the Canterbury Tales and into his other poems. So I think right from that very initial moment of writing, we can see that the wife of Barthe is different from Chaucer's other characters. And that does go on. So we don't have that much evidence of how Chaucer's contemporaries were immediately reading his texts. What we do have are comments on manuscripts. So chaucer died in 1400, and we have quite a lot of manuscripts from the 15th century, so from the time after Chaucer's death. And a lot of the scribes who wrote out the manuscripts would write comments, which are called glosses, in the margins of the manuscripts. Now, most commonly, those glosses are just things like little pointing fingers which are called manicules, pointing to important bits of the text. Text or little phrases which say things like nota bene, you know, note, well this thing, or references to sources, you know, saying, well, this comes from this bit of the Bible. But what we see in lots of manuscripts is scribes writing an awful lot more next to the Wife of Bath's prologue in particular than they do on the parts of the manuscript which are, you know, the rest of the Canterbury Tales. So we see very early on scribes being, you know, obsessed with trying to. To argue with the Wife of Bath, really. So they. They're fascinated by her, but they're also troubled by what she says, and they want to give a counter voice and speak against her. And then we also. Early examples, I mean, just you. You were just talking about the idea that in. In modern times, you were saying that, you know, she's excerpted more than all the rest put together. And in quite an early example, the poet Skelton describes the Canterbury Tales. He gives four lines to the Canterbury Tales as a whole, and then 10 to the wife of Bath, describing the Wife of Bath. So that's an exact late medieval example of what you were describing later on.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah, I just.

[Interviewer]

I'm fascinated by the idea. It really makes me want to imagine what was happening in Chaucer's mind as he was. As this character was sort of running away from him, in a sense. And it reminds me of a story Mark Twain had told about how he. He one day could just hear Huckleberry Finn's voice. And it was so interesting. And he sort of said, I could just put my feet up and listen to him all day. And you wonder if Chaucer felt that way about the Wife of Bath, if he felt like, boy, here I've come across this point of view of this that just isn't heard, but is a. A point of view of the people I know, the women. I know that it's been like an Unheard voice. But I think I can really use this to say a lot, or maybe I'm wondering how she would respond to this. So I want to put her in this situation and that situation and then

[Jack Wilson]

kind of let her talk.

[Interviewer]

Do we have any awareness of whether there was a woman in Chaucer's life who.

[Jack Wilson]

Who he, you know, he was in

[Interviewer]

love with or he knew well, or a sister or anything like that that could have triggered this kind of woman that he was writing about? Or do we think it just sort of came out of his mind?

[Professor Marion Turner]

Wow. There's so much there that I'd like to respond to. I mean, just briefly first, when you were talking about Mark Twain. I read an article recently about the number of writers who do hear the voices of their characters. And it's really common for them actually to report hearing the voices of their characters. And it's also very common for readers to say that they hear the voices of the characters in books that they read, which I think is really, really interesting, how much people are listening to those voices. And that, of course, was something that was perhaps much more implicitly encouraged in societies where literature was much more of an oral form as well. Because today, so many of us read silently on our own, whereas in Chaucer's day, people were reading out loud, usually publicly, usually in groups, you know, talking about these characters, literally hearing people voice those characters. So I think that's a side point to your main question. But it is interesting, I think, but in terms of your question there about the women in his life, I mean. So one thing that I'm absolutely not arguing is that she is based on a specific woman. I think that it's really important to look at the way that Chaucer is pulling together literary sources and the historical reality around him and putting all those things together to create this particular kind of character. At the same time, I think the historical context, the women that were around him, are crucially important in trying to think about that. Because both then and now, there are many societies in which a woman like this simply would not make sense. A woman who is able to inherit money, is able to work and earn money, can make choices about her marital partners, can leave the house on her own, can travel on holiday without her husband or father. Can you do all those kinds of things? There are still societies today in which that kind of woman simply is not imaginable. And in the 14th century, there were lots of societies around the world and even around Europe, in which that kind of woman would not really be imaginable. But at that time in England, that kind of woman made complete sense. In the late 14th century, after the plague. You know, people have called this era a kind of golden age for women. And I think it's really important not to idealize that. Of course, there were all kinds of problems for women at that time. However, they did have a lot more opportunities than people often imagine was the case for medieval women. You know, they did. Many medieval women did have jobs, did control their own money, were able to marry many times and keep their money, and you'd be able to. To have a certain amount of economic control and a certain amount of control over their sexual destiny. So I think that does really matter. In thinking about. I don't want to suggest that she's a timeless character. Although she has been meaningful for so many people in so many different eras, she's still rooted in her own historical moment, which was such a fascinating historical moment. And the, you know, the first half of my book tries to recreate that by telling the stories of lots and lots of different medieval women. But I think you were also just asking about, you know, the women in Chaucer's life. And Chaucer was surrounded by all kinds of strong and interesting women. You know, his mother was a property owner who remarried as well, and his wife was a lady in waiting in a great household who always had her own salary, earned her own money. His daughter became a nun in a very prestigious nunnery with highly educated women. When he lived in London, he was surrounded by mercantile women who would often run their own businesses, particularly if they were widows. They would often go on running their husband's businesses that they could also trade on their own. And when Chaucer was at court, the courts were presided over by very powerful women who were often cultural patrons as well. Philippa of Hainault and then Anne of Bohemia. And Chaucer's own first employer was a woman, Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster, who married one of the king's sons. So Lionel of Antwerp, one of the sons of Edward iii. And Elizabeth, was employing Chaucer as a page boy when he was a teenager. So he had lots of examples in his life of women who had real power, who had voices that were listened to. But in literature, there were not many examples of ordinary women whose voices were heard.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, it is funny how there can be a divide like that. I remember. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the show Seinfeld, but I can remember when I was in college and that came out, and Elaine felt like such A revelation. And I just remember thinking this character

[Jack Wilson]

is like the people I know.

[Interviewer]

This is like the women I'm going

[Jack Wilson]

to school with here.

[Interviewer]

This is who they are. And they remind me of her. And it felt like she was so advanced in terms of not just being the. The beautiful bombshell that the men all acted stupid when they were around her or not like the other stereotypes that you might see on television sitcoms, but that she just felt real and three dimensional. And I'm guessing that the wife of Beth felt that way for a lot of people who were early readers of, you know. Well, maybe this is something for us to argue about, but we can't deny that there are people like this that we know.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah, I mean, that's a really interesting comparison. It made me think about so in Zadie Smith's recent version of the wife of so the wife of Willsden, there's a great line where she says the shock never ends when women say things usually said by men. And in a way that could be applied to someone like Elaine as well, couldn't it? That the kind of, the surprise, the shock of that kind of character that we keep seeing, that we keep being surprised by because it is still unusual to have those kinds of frank, more down to earth women in our culture.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. She's just one of the four. She's not. Okay, well, let's take a quick break and then we'll come back. I want to ask you some questions about how one writes a biography about a person who did not actually exist.

[Jack Wilson]

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[Professor Marion Turner]

Farm is there now at McDonald's a

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[Jack Wilson]

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[Professor Marion Turner]

Prices and participation may vary.

[Interviewer]

Prices may be higher for delivery. Okay, we're back with Professor Marion Turner, expert in Chaucer and the Wife of Bath. Professor Turner, what approach did you take to this book? You could have written a character study or an analysis, a full length book, even on the Wife of Beth. But instead you styled it as a biography. So what does that mean?

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah, so I know in some ways it seems odd, doesn't it, the idea of writing a biography of someone who didn't exist. And I think there were two, I think, main reasons for that. So the first was that I wanted to tell lots of women's stories because so I'm interested in the Wife of Bath as an experiment in literary character, but I'm also interested in her as, as a comparison with real historical women. And so, you know, by taking her as my lens, I could then really listen to lots of other women's stories and tell those stories. There's often limited evidence, so we have I can tell little snapshots about lots of interesting women and relate them to the Wife of Bath. So in the first half of the book you know, one of the things that I do is I take different aspect rights of the Wife of Bath, the fact that she's multiply married, the fact that she's a working woman, the fact that she's a traveling wandering woman, and the fact that she's a female storyteller. And then I compare her, I tell the stories of people such as writers like Christine de Pisan or Heloise Travelers, the maid who travels around Europe and gets a great new job in Rome, abandoning her employer. Multiply married women like the 15th century Duchess who marries at age 65, marries a teenager. You know, working women who inherit money, women who formed unions in the 1360s. I could kind of recover a lot of interesting voices. And then I suppose the other aspect that I found experimental and interesting about this idea of, that I had about doing a biography of a literary character was to let her cross time, so to think about this cross temporal aspect. And one of the inspirations for that was thinking about Virginia Woolf's Orlando. It's a. A fictional book, but it's also a fictionalized biography of a real person. Vita Sackville West. And again, it crosses time and thinks about the character, also crosses gender. And Woolf is also writing about gender across time, about hundreds of years and this kind of march through time. And I really like the idea of thinking about this character first within her text and then getting out of her text and starting this kind of journey across time, across the world, which then really allowed me to think about. About gender in, in every era since the Wife of Bath as well. And again, having this very specific focus, but having a very wide lens because she went, you know, everywhere into so many authors, texts. And it allowed me to then think about the medieval across time and right up to the modern day, which, you know, I found a really interesting thing to do. So. So the biography was really an approach that allowed me to be, to be experimental, to do lots of different things. But I hope to anchor it in something very, very coherent.

[Jack Wilson]

Right.

[Interviewer]

I've done some episodes on figures like that, Don Juan is one. And sort of these literary archetypes that will recur in different eras and different societies and in the hands of different artists. And you really can kind of use that as a way of exploring what that era was thinking about a lot of these same themes. And she's certainly, I mean, she's almost like Robin Hood or King Arthur or someone like that who has kind of stepped out of the page, so to speak.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah, exactly. And I mean, those examples that you give people such as Robin Hood and King Arthur are kind of mythical, you know, figures who don't seem to initially to belong to any author. And so it's very interesting that the Wife of Bath comes very specifically from one author, but then is taken up by so many others. I mean, there's not many characters like that. And the other women that are like that tend to be, you know, figures such as. As Dido or Cleopatra or Helen of Troy. So again, these very kind of mythical figures and queens usually, so not at all this kind of ordinary woman. So she's a very interesting example.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Okay, so a lot of people thinking about this might think, okay, so you traced 500 years or so of 600 now of the wife of Beth, and it's probably a march toward enlightenment. It's probably. We're looking at. In the early days, people were. Those old fuddy duddies were scandalized by her licentiousness and so on. But today we've become more enlightened. We're more familiar with it, and we're more comfortable with it and all of that.

[Jack Wilson]

But instead, as you note, it isn't

[Interviewer]

a story of decreasing misogyny over the centuries. So how was the 20th century, in some ways more misogynistic than what you were able to see in the 15th century?

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah, it's really interesting, isn't it? And I think it's a great example of just helping us to think about what happens across history more generally, because we'd all like to think, as you were suggesting there, that there's a kind of march of progress, that things improve. But as soon as we start to think about many aspects of the history of the 20th century, we realize how wrong that is. So when you think about the wife of birth across time. So, for instance, in. In the 14th century, there was no problem with the way that she talked so explicitly about sex and her body. Once you get to the 18th century, she's being censored all over the place. When Pope writes, his version takes out all the bits about sex and genitals and liking to have sex in the morning and all those kinds of things. And so, you know, he truncates it and censors it very, very dramatically in the 20th century. So I think the most misogynistic examples that. That I found of responses to the wife of did come in the 20th century. And the 1970s, the decade in which I was born, was a particularly dark time. So I think the, you know, the. The most extreme example is Pasolini's version. So Pasolini film about the Canterbury Tales. And Pasolini, his response to the Canterbury Tales is extraordinarily limited because the point of the Canterbury Tales above all else is variety and diversity. You know, the idea that, that you can, we should all listen to lots and lots of different voices, different, different kinds of tales. The fact that Chaucer is able to experiment with so many different genres and voices and perspectives and really suggests the importance of that. But Pasolini is only interested in sex. So all the, all the tales that he tells are about sex. And if they're not about sex in Chaucer, then he just puts in extra brothel scenes, often with really disturbing and degrading kinds of sex in them. And his depiction of the Wife of Bath is really monstrous. You know, he takes away all of her fun and humor and vitality and the charm which so many people have, have found in her. And for Pasolini, this middle aged, sexually active woman is a figure of death. So having sex with her literally kills her fourth husband and then her fifth husband just has no sexual interest in her, cannot get aroused. She ends up biting him on the nose in a kind of symbol of castration. She is absolutely the stereotype. But worse that Chaucer had moved away from, you know, she's really extreme. And as we see so often across time, this real discomfort from some male authors or directors as well, in this case real discomfort with the idea of middle aged female sexuality. That's something that was very much alive in, in the 70s and of course is very much alive today with, with lots of people. So I think that the fact that we don't see things getting steadily better across time is really important for us always to think about that. You know, in many parts of the world we've seen real steps backwards in recent years and in laws about, about gender relations in specific area that I'm looking at in this book about the wife of birth. Happily we have actually seen really great examples in the last 20 years of I think, very sensitive and more accepting and you funny and clever interpretations of the Wife of Bath. And I think that is, you know, that is partly because she's been taken up by a more diverse range of authors, by a lot more female authors in the last couple of decades though I don't think that's the only reason. But that's not to say that we're going to, there's not going to be further downturns in the future, but I hope not.

[Interviewer]

So you say that in the 15th century they were concerned with combating her rhetorical Power. So was it the promotion of a kind of feminist view or what were they trying to combat?

[Professor Marion Turner]

Well, so in her prologue, the wife of Bath is advocating for a very kind of sexually, I suppose, liberated, we would think of way of way for women to act in the world. And she's. She's describing all kinds of very bad behavior and also that she. That she partakes and, you know, kind of lying and. And so on to. To her husbands. And the scribes, I think, who were writing on the manuscripts were very worried that, you know, women were going to. Readers were going to think it was okay to behave like this. And so. But, you know, in fairness, that doesn't mean that they therefore censor it the way that that was to happen in later centuries, but it means that they write a lot of things next to the wife of Bart's words, essentially saying, you know, this is really wrong. She's really terrible. And the way they do that often is by piling up lots and lots of biblical quotations against what she's saying. And she's often quoting the Bible in a partial way, and then they also quote the Bible in a very partial way. But, you know, when I was looking into these scribal commentaries, I found one really interesting example where, you know, the wife of Bath is. Is talking and the scribe, right, gives lots of biblical quotations right next to what she's saying. And essentially these quotations are all saying, you know, don't listen to women. Women are so. Are so terrible. You know, don't believe her. And one of these. One of these biblical quotations, it's in Latin, but the English translation is, you know, but the tongue of a woman no man can tame. And I looked it up in the Bible, having read the gloss in the manuscript. And in the Bible, there is no mulierum. There is no of a woman. It's just. But the tongue, no man can tame. It's not about gender at all. And so the scribe, while saying, don't listen to stupid old women, you know, they get it all wrong, is himself.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Misquoting the Bible and getting it wrong.

[Interviewer]

It's so interesting, this kind of scholarship you're doing. I'm thinking someone hundreds of years from now would probably be examining works from our era and saying, look at how many times it was liked or retweeted or look at how many comments this passage provoked. And you're kind of doing the analog version of it by looking at what these monks were writing in the margins. And. Okay, so I have one final question for you on Chaucer? It is a surprise bonus question.

[Jack Wilson]

Are you ready?

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay.

[Interviewer]

One fine spring morning, you are strolling through the Kentish countryside when an April shower bursts forth, turning the air pleasant, but unfortunately creating some slippery ground.

[Jack Wilson]

You fall and gently bump your head.

[Interviewer]

Alas, when you awake, you find yourself

[Jack Wilson]

sitting under a tree with a table set for two.

[Interviewer]

A genial spirit resembling JRR Tolkien smiles and says, hello, my dear fellow scholar,

[Jack Wilson]

today is your lucky day.

[Interviewer]

You will be having tea with a special guest. And I have two possibilities of candidates I think you might like.

[Jack Wilson]

You can either talk to Geoffrey Chaucer,

[Interviewer]

asking him any questions you like about his life and writings and his inspiration

[Jack Wilson]

for the Wife of Bath, or you

[Interviewer]

can spend the afternoon talking to a

[Jack Wilson]

woman from his era, an ordinary middle

[Interviewer]

class woman, and ask her whatever you

[Jack Wilson]

like about her world and her worldview. Which do you choose?

[Professor Marion Turner]

Oh, wow, that is such an incredibly difficult and clever question. Right. So when you were first asking that question in the first part of it, I was thinking, well, you know, who could I possibly choose other than Chaucer? I mean, this is going to be easy because obviously I would go. It's going to be like Chaucer or Shakespeare.

[Interviewer]

Right, right, right.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Obviously, I'm gonna go for Chaucer. You know, this is. This is really. No, no problem. But now that you've come up with the Ordinary Woman, I really am gonna go for her. And the reason I do that is that although, of course, I would like to know about whether the things that I think about Chaucer are whether they stack up with what he thought. But I would say that I do know a lot about Chaucer already. You know, we have a huge amount of evidence, and he wrote so much that we know he wrote, and we have that to draw on. And so, although I don't feel I could ever know enough about Chaucer, I do have a lot of. The Ordinary Woman is still such a difficult area of historical and of literary research. And although I've tried to piece together all kinds of things and there are traces of ordinary women's voices all over the place, but I think that opportunity to speak to someone whose voice is not so much recorded elsewhere would be an opportunity that I couldn't pass up. Sorry, Jeffrey.

[Interviewer]

Well, he had his say.

[Professor Marion Turner]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Interviewer]

The book is called the Wife of a Biography.

[Jack Wilson]

Professor Marion Turner.

[Interviewer]

Thank you so much for joining me

[Jack Wilson]

on the history of literature.

[Professor Marion Turner]

It has been a huge pleasure to talk to you. Thank you. And thank you to everyone who's listened.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay.

[Interviewer]

There we go.

[Jack Wilson]

And if you are hoping to hear more about Chaucer from Professor Turner, well, you're in luck because we've invited her back and she has agreed. Hopefully we will have that episode for you soon. Please do check out her book in the meantime, the Wife of a biography. I think you will like it.

[Interviewer]

We've got lots of good literature coming

[Jack Wilson]

up for you here on the history of literature. Black Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Persuasion.

[Interviewer]

And.

[Jack Wilson]

And that's just the spring. 104 episodes this year. The gauntlet was thrown down by my rivals. Well, the rival that lives in my head and makes New year's resolutions anyway. 104, Jack. 52 times 2, if you haven't guessed. Will we make it? We will. Hopefully. We will. We will. Will we? We will. My thanks to Professor Turner for joining us today. Did we say that yet? And here's one we didn't say. But we will. Thanks to all of you. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.

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