The Wife of Bath in Afterlife

By focusing on one literary character, as interpreted in both verbal art and visual art at a point midway in time between the author’s era and our own, this study applies methodology appropriate for overcoming limitations posed by historical periodization and by isolation among academic specialities. Current trends in Chaucer scholarship call for diachronic afterlife studies like this one, sometimes termed “medievalism.” So far, however, nearly all such work by-passes the eighteenth century (her