ABSTRACT
In the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer presents the characters through a cumulative list of details. The success of the fabliau style and its novelty in English was fully appreciated by Chaucer’s immediate successors. Most obviously true in the case of that most complex and complete of Chaucer’s comic creations, the Wife of Bath. In the Man of Law’s Tale, Chaucer may occasionally smile at the conflicts with which saintliness at large in the world is inevitably faced – whether in bed or in those situations, so common to heroines of this kind, in which would-be ravishers are repelled with uncompromising violence. In the case of the Wife of Bath, Chaucer seems first to have planned to give her a tale typical of the kind of marital strategy sketched out by La Vieille in the Roman de la Rose.
