SOURCE: Blamires, Alcuin. “Refiguring the ‘Scandalous Excess’ of Medieval Woman: The Wife of Bath and Liberality.” In Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance, edited by Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees, pp. 57-78. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

In the following essay, Blamires contrasts the Wife of Bath to Blanche from The Book of the Duchess, studies Christine de Pizan's theories on the masculine and feminine definitions of largesse and liberality, and uncovers the stereotype common in Chaucer's time that women were miserly and selfish.

Medieval defenses of women can seem strangely heterogeneous: Bizarre conglomerations of biblical observation, judicial logic, physiology, anecdote, exemplum, moral polemic, topped off with a colorful froth of psychoanalytical speculation about the motives of detractors. Yet there is an underlying continuity, which is to be found in the moral or ethical dimension of the debate. This is explicitly so, of...