“White Feminist Wife of Bath?: Feminism, Race, and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue

A Lecture by Carissa Harris, Temple University

Friday, May 5, 7:00 p.m., Great Hall

This lecture is part of the Carol J. Worrell Annual Lecture Series on Literature

Geoffrey Chaucer’s fun, outspoken, larger-than-life Wife of Bath is often celebrated as a medieval example of a feminist literary character. But if she is a feminist, what kind of feminist is she? This lecture examines gender, race, and economics in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue through the specific lens of white feminism, which enables us to see her character in a new light.

Carissa M. Harris is Associate Professor of English at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she teaches courses on a range of topics including Chaucer, medieval sexualities, medieval alehouse literature, and the history of the word “wench.” She is the author of Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain (2018) and the co-editor of Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature (2022).