The voice of a female golden age

The 14th century was a time of great change in England - not least for women, who enjoyed more autonomy, work opportunities and wealth. Marion Turner explains what Chaucer's outspoken Wife of Bath reveals about their lives and thoughts

- Marion Turner

Meet and greet The pilgrims assemble at the Tabard Inn, Southwark in a woodcut from a c1484 edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Among the travellers were a prioress and a nun - but it's the Wife of Bath who exposes most truths about medieval women's lives

The great 14th-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer frequently shared the wisdom of others in his writing. In his poems, for example, he recommends Homer, Virgil and Ovid, admired authorities in medieval culture.

One of his short, personal verses, though, recommends a less well-known counsel. In it, Chaucer advises - indeed, implores - his friend Sir Peter Bukton, when pondering a decision about marriage, to read the words of Alison, the Wife of Bath. She was a peculiarly unlikely source of enlightenment - because she was a figment of his own imagination.

The Wife is the only one of Chaucer's characters whom he treats as an author in her own right. He takes her outside her own text, written in the late 14th century, and writes about this character as if she is a real person.

This act is particularly striking because, in her own Prologue, the Wife bewails the fact that women's voices have not been heard throughout history. The reason why books say such terrible things about women, she declares, is that thus far they have all been written by men - specifically, by impotent old clerics. Fantasising about what would have happened "if wommen hadde writen stories", she says they would have expounded so much about the "wickedness" of men that nobody would be able to refute them.