ABSTRACT
In the General Prologue, the pilgrim-narrator’s use and abuse of the word gentil reflect both his interpretative limitations and the difficulty of determining value in his multivalent world. At the end of The Wife of Bath’s Tale, gentillesse is again at the center of Geoffrey Chaucer’s concerns as the Loathly Bride offers her disconsolate young groom a sermon on that subject. The issues which the hag presents in her sermon do reflect Alison’s concerns throughout her Prologue and Tale. The chapter discusses the concerns of the Loathly Lady and of the Wife closely resemble the artistic questions of the poet who created them. Gentillesse had traditionally been an aristocratic attribute belonging to those who possessed property, rank, and power, who fulfilled the criteria outlined by the knight in the Wife’s Tale. The question of intrinsic worth and its relationship to convention explains the presence of the sermon on gentillesse in The Wife of Bath’s Tale.
