Beginning of Essay
In reading Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," I found that of the Wife of Bath, including her prologue, to be the most thought-provoking. The pilgrim who narrates this tale, Alison, is a gap-toothed, partially deaf seamstress and widow who has been married fi ....

Middle of Essay
.... the consummate righteous man, willing to sacrifice self for the worthy cause of the afflicted and weak; on the other, we have the sad truth that the human knight rarely lived up to this ideal(Patterson 170). In a work by Muriel Bowden, Associate Professor of English at Hunter College, she explains that the knights of the Middle Ages were "merely mounted soldiers, . . . notorious" for their utter cruelty(18). The tale Bath's Wife weaves exposes that Chaucer was aware of both forms of the medieval soldier. Where as his knowledge that knights were often far from perfect is evidenced in the beginning of Alison's tale where the "lusty" soldier rapes a ....