Chaucer’s Knight is the personification of those [courtly] ideals, yet he is far more than the lay figure he would be were he that alone; like the other pilgrims taking this April journey to Canterbury, he is flesh and blood. He is one of those exceptional heroes who strive to live according to a great ideal yet who are at the same time understandably and understandingly human.
-Muriel Bowden, A Commentary on the General Prologue
to the Canterbury Tales, 1969
The next pilgrim was the Wife of Bath, that lusty realist beside whom only Falstaff and Sancho Panza are worthy to walk. It is not until the lady swings into action that her remarkable qualities become evident, but even the brief portrait in the Prologue makes it clear that here is no ordinary woman.
-Marchette Chute, Geoffrey Chaucer of England, 1958
Chaucer knows his heroine [Alison] from her plucked eyebrows to the laces on her shoes…. He calls her a pet and a doll and a piggie’s eye, and records with delight that she was softer than sheep’s wool and prettier than a pear tree in bloom. He is charmed with her… and considers her so “gay a popelote” that the reader forgets, under Chaucer’s brilliant and affectionate guidance, that she is only a common little flirt of a kind that could be duplicated by the dozen in any town in any century.
-Marchette Chute, Geoffrey Chaucer of England, 1958
THE END