Marion Turner’s latest bookbegins with a bold and provocative claim: that in the Wife of Bath, “the first ordinary woman in English literature,” Chaucer “produced something--someone--completely new” (2-3). Claims of radical literary and characterological innovation such as this one are often suspect. Yet Turner’s claim feels at least instinctually correct. Whenever I teach the early English survey, I find that undergraduate students tend to perk up when we reach the Wife of Bath’s Prologue; they talk about Alison as if she were an actual human being with real opinions. In doing so, these students unknowingly participate in a long-standing tradition that, as early as the fifteenth century, treated the Wife of Bath as a three-dimensional figure with a voice and a life outside the text. And this is, of course, a tradition in which Turner herself participates when she announces, in her book’s cover, that she will recount the “biography” of a fictional character. There is something specialabout the Wife of Bath. She is, as Turner puts it, “accessible, familiar, and, in a strange way, real” (2).

Turner divides her book into two parts. In Part 1 (“Medieval Wives of Bath: Ordinary Women and English Literature”), she carefully situates Alison in her historical context, with a particular focus on how this character resembles real-life women in late medieval England. In Part 2 (“Alison’s Afterlife, 1400-2021”), Turner explores how and why later writers and artists--from fifteenth-century scribes to twenty-first-century authors--have “reinterpreted, reshaped, and reimagined” the Wife and her unique voice (139). Throughout both parts, and much like Chaucer himself, Turner is thinking about her audience. Indeed, this is the rare book in medieval studies that, grounded in meticulous historical research and close reading, is designed to reach a wide audience beyond the academy. (In fact, it already has.) Written in prose that is simultaneously lively and erudite, The Wife of Bath: A Biography constitutes an exciting model for public-facing scholarship in the field. Crucially, Turner highlights rather than conceals the scholarly apparatus that scaffolds her own readings: she celebrates recent and canonical work in the field and introduces it to a wide audience.

The book’s first chapter is its most ambitious. In it, Turner examines the literary techniques that Chaucer employed, in both Prologue and Tale, to render this fictional character “more akin to a person than to a collection of words” and thus fit for a biography (28). The poetic style of the confessional prologue suggests a “mind unfolding” in time and produces an “illusion of interiority” (39). As she upends the male fantasy at the core of the “loathly lady” tale, Alison becomes “a character with a literary subjectivity that affects and alters the story that she tells” (42). Turner deftly synthetizes almost a century of scholarship that has reckoned with the “realism” of the Wife of Bath and her traveling companions, carefully weaving her own readings into this scholarly fabric. Turner’s greatest strength in this chapter is her attention to detail. For instance, in an especially insightful and amusing reading, she suggests that Alison’s outrageous behavior at her husband’s funeral--she examines and praises a pallbearer’s legs and feet--cultivates an “illusion of honesty” that makes readers “feel that they can see inside her head” (39). Likely owing to the necessary limitations of this kind of hybrid book, some of Turner’s key terms and concepts--among them, “character,” “subjectivity,” “interiority,” and “personhood”--remain underexamined. Still, she successfully brings into relief a central feature of Chaucer’s art: his ability, perhaps unmatched among premodern writers, to attain verisimilitude.

Throughout the rest of Part 1, Turner situates the Wife of Bath, as if she were a real person, within a broader cultural, societal, and economic context. Having established her literary distinctiveness, Turner now highlights Alison’s relative ordinariness. In Chapter 2, she explains that, owing to demographic changes after the plague, it was not uncommon for northern European women to work and to have some degree of economic independence. In Chapter 3, she contends that remarriage was fairly common among--indeed expected for--widows in elite English circles; Alison’s defense of remarriage thus counters “old-fashioned attitudes” preserved in books, which would have seemed “odd” to Chaucer’s contemporaries (78). In these two excellent chapters, Turner advances that, in the Wife of Bath, Chaucer did not create a wholly idiosyncratic character who stood outside the parameters of fourteenth-century English society; rather, he portrayed an identity that, though “socially central in his world,” was nevertheless “textually marginalized” (83).

Still, despite these historical analogues, the Wife of Bath remains an idiosyncratic figure within the Canterbury Tales: the poem is rife with women who lack Alison’s sexual agency and economic independence. For instance, in an episode that is mostly played for laughs in the Reeve’s Tale, Malyne and her mother are raped as part of a revenge plot. Especially since the discovery of new documents pertaining to Cecily Champaigne--who is mentioned only once in Turner’s book (41)--feminist scholars such as Carissa Harris, Sarah Baechle, and Samantha Katz Seal have urged renewed attention to structural misogyny in the Middle Ages, especially as it informs Chaucer’s portrayals of sexual violence and servant women. These archival discoveries (and the feminist responses to them) are likely too recent to have been incorporated into Turner’s book. Still, Chaucer’s other female characters--Malyne, Virginia, Dorigen--suggest that, even as she reflects the lived reality of some medieval women, the Wife of Bath was very much an exception in Chaucer’s male-dominated society.

In the next two chapters, Turner further compares Alison to real medieval women. In Chapter 4, she explains that, although they were seldom named or recognized, medieval women “were profoundly engaged in textual culture” (91). To support this claim, Turner offers a rich sketch of Alice Chaucer--the poet’s granddaughter and “noted cultural patron” (95)--as well as of named women authors who may have served as models for Chaucer’s female storyteller: among them, Heloise, Marie de France, and Christine de Pizan. By juxtaposing “the fictional Alison” and “the real Christine,” Turner points to, though does not fully interrogate, key questions raised by her methodology (108). Since Alison is, unlike Heloise or Marie, the fictional creation of a male author, is she (or can she even be) an accurate representation of a woman’s voice and perspective? Given this, what is the ideological purchase of her verisimilitude? Has the fictional Wife of Bath displaced the voices of real medieval women in classrooms and in the popular imagination? Concluding the first half of the book, in chapter 5, Turner paints a rich picture of women travelers and pilgrims in the later Middle Ages. Nevertheless, she also highlights the difficulties they faced, as well as misogynistic views that associated women’s travel with sexual licentiousness. Once again, Turner suggests that, although women were less likely to engage in the kinds of foreign travel that the Wife of Bath recounts, Alison is not wholly idiosyncratic: her travels are, much like her five marriages, “excessive and opulent,” though not “incredible” (113).

In Part 2, Turner traces the Wife of Bath across a wide range of texts and media. Due to the scope of her archive, Turner prioritizes breadth over depth, indeed announcing that she will focus on finding “patterns and trends” (141). Yet Turner combines this macro-level analysis with the extended examination of individual episodes in the Wife’s reception history, which rely on the slow and attuned analysis of language and style. Chapter 6, which is especially successful in this respect, examines how Chaucer’s readers have, for generations, attempted to “diminish, punish, or limit Alison in some way” (161). For instance, later versions of the early modern ballad The Wanton Wife of Bath sanitized the titular character’s rebelliousness and thus her potential for political subversion; John Dryden repeatedly condemned Alison’s licentiousness and refused to include her Prologue in his Fables, Ancient and Modern. Most of the chapter focuses on the Wife of Bath’s reception in the fifteenth century. Rather than focus on the usual suspects (Hoccleve, Lydgate, Dunbar, and Skelton are relegated to a list), Turner turns--unexpectedly and thrillingly--to scribal commentaries and glosses that purposefully twist the themes and message of Prologue and Tale. She focuses primarily on the antifeminist glosses in London, British Library, Egerton 2864, which excoriate Alison and render her into “a negative example” for future readers (149). Engaging closely with the glossator’s language and argument, and especially his use and misuse of Scripture, Turner concludes that the (presumably male) scribe seeks “to wrest the text, and readers’ interpretation of the text, into a different direction” (151). Yet the Egerton glossator’s discomfort and attempts to silence Alison signal her enduring power. Turner’s extended engagement with medieval scribal practice--which, surprisingly for a book of this kind, boldly quotes a gloss in the original Latin (148)--signals the book’s greatest strength: how Turner employs the medievalist’s toolkit to craft an accessible yet sophisticated argument that does not sacrifice the integrity of her research.

In Chapter 7, which focuses on Shakespeare’s engagement with the Wife of Bath, Turner proposes an exciting model for reception history: rather than focus on the early modern playwright’s redeployment of Chaucerian lines and plots, she aims to excavate an “indebtedness” so profound that it is almost unrecognizable (171). The Wife of Bath, Turner proposes, showed Shakespeare “what a literary character can be and can do” (172). Turner thus expands Harold Bloom’s assertion that Alison was an “almost invincible, hidden foundation” for Shakespeare’s Falstaff (174). The two characters are “excessively wordy” and “excessively bodily” (179). Still, to be fully convincing, this intriguing contention--and, I would argue, any attempt at excavating an invisible or hidden source--would require extended stylistic analysis likely inappropriate for this kind of wide-ranging study. The chapter then concludes with a tighter yet also more conventional argument about Shakespeare’s reception of Chaucer: The Merry Wives of Windsor resembles the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale in plot (“the need for women to educate men about women”) and in its perspective on gender relations (“allowing women to control their own bodies and marriages”). Both Shakespeare and Chaucer thus “engage in gender play in their carnival insistence on the idea of women on top” (187).

Chapter 8 traces the Wife of Bath’s reception in literature and films produced outside Britain from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, which evince “reactionary and conservative misogyny” (210). Voltaire justifies the rape that opens the Tale and, by deploying a more conventional version of the “loathly lady” story, produces an antifeminist narrative. The American playwright Percy MacKaye juxtaposes the virtuous Prioress with a “quasi-rapist” Alison, “who wants to marry Chaucer against his desire” (203). The Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini vilifies sexual intercourse with a mature Alice and thus deploys “patriarchal, misogynist myths about the horror of female sexuality” (207). Masterfully weaving together intricate close readings and lively synopses, Turner shows how these adaptations distort and flatten the Wife of Bath, turning her into a misogynist stereotype fit for medieval antifeminist writing. Whereas Chapter 8 encounters Alison across genres and media, Chapter 9 highlights her significance for the modern novel: a genre that Turner characterizes as “private and silent” and thus prima facie opposed to the garrulous Wife of Bath (212). Like Shakespeare’s Falstaff and like Alison, James Joyce’s Molly Bloom speaks “in the form of a confession that seems to be unfiltered” (215). Moreover, she embodies a version of womanhood and female sexuality patterned after the Wife of Bath. In contrast, the novelist Vera Chapman domesticates Alison by turning her into a mother--and in doing so, makes her significantly less interesting. Finally, in her 2019 Alisoun Sings, Caroline Bergvall combines medieval and modern references, as well as modern and Middle English spelling, to assert “the ongoing importance of the past” (225). The work’s experimental form--which combines prose, poetry, and song--parades the difficulties and ethical ramifications of “muting an oral text” (222).

The book’s final chapter examines recent adaptations of Prologue and Tale by Jean “Binta” Breeze, Patience Agbabi, and Zadie Smith. In these, “Alison becomes a Black woman with a transnational identity” (227). Turner highlights the inventiveness of these works, thus stressing their significance and literary value beyond their place in a reception history. In addition to showing how these authors transpose Chaucer’s world onto postcolonial locales, most of the chapter seeks to answer a deceptively simple question: why were these authors inspired by Chaucer--a quintessential “dead white man” (233)--in the first place? Turner suggests that these writers were inspired by the irregularity of Middle English and the spoken nature of Chaucer’s poetry: they “declare the vitality of all kinds of versions of English” and thus “reclaim English poetry from an exclusive standardized tradition” (240-41). The other half of Turner’s answer proves significantly more polemical: Chaucer’s poetry reflects not “a monocultural England” but a multilingual world defined by cross-cultural exchange. He was “an experimental, even radical poet whose poetics were driven by the idea of hearing multiple voices and perspectives, and who asserted the importance of listening to marginal voices” (233-34). Turner thus gestures to the questions of identity, representation, and the ethics of authorship that have become increasingly prominent in the field in recent years. Was Chaucer “woman’s friend,” as the sixteenth-century Scots poet Gavin Douglas put it, or an aider and abettor of rape culture? To what extent did Chaucer share his pilgrims’ antisemitic and Islamophobic views? Turner does not provide much room for these debates. As she did in her 2019Chaucer: A European Life--a book that tacitly pitted the poet against an increasingly isolationist twenty-first-century Britain--Turner envisions Chaucer as a cosmopolitan writer who did not merely tolerate but actively championed a multicultural society.

This book is full of thought-provoking claims about the Wife of Bath’s afterlives, as well as about the innovative literary techniques that have launched such a rich and creative tradition. The most polemical ones--for instance, that Alison was an “ordinary” woman or that Chaucer advocated for a multicultural society--are likely to face scrutiny by medievalists in coming years. Yet this has always been the case for the best and most confident scholarship on Chaucer. But what is perhaps the book’s greatest contribution, in addition to its tone and accessibility, is its rich portrait of medieval society beyond the Wife of Bath and Chaucer’s poem. In her methodology, even as she recounts the biography of a fictional character, Turner stresses the importance of research into the lives of medieval women: each of the real, historical women introduced in the book are as fabulous as Alison herself.