ABSTRACT
Two of the most distinguished scholars and critics of Geoffrey Chaucer have stated that the Bible seems to have been the one book “continually present” to Chaucer’s imagination and “the source which Chaucer drew on more than any other, and which he must have accepted completely.” Claims for the Bible’s absolute authority, necessary and sufficient truth, and preeminent beauty are commonplaces of medieval ecclesiastical literature. John Gower’s formula, applicable to the Pardoner, seems however to be a much less adequate way of explaining the textual strategies applied to the Bible by the Wife of Bath. The Parson’s use of the sun-dunghill simile leads us to another conjunction in the area of fiction and the Bible, a conjunction between Chaucer and the older Italian contemporary from whose works he borrowed more major narrative subject matter than from anywhere else, the Bible included.
