“Rowned She a Pistel”: National Institutions and Identities According to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath

[C]ountries are not defined merely by power and political sovereignty, but by the traditions, sentiments and aspirations of those who live in them.

—R. R. Davies¹

Although critical consensus on the national character of late medieval states has remained elusive, for a time in the late twentieth century, Chaucerians seemed to agree that, as Derek Pearsall writes, “no English poet” could be “less interested in England as a nation” than Geoffrey Chaucer himself.² Pearsall and other important scholars, including Ardis Butterfield, Elizabeth Salter, Thorlac Turville-Petre, and David Wallace, present Chaucer as a relatively tolerant observer among more xenophobic medieval writers, interpreting his “internationalism” as a distinct alternative to nationalism.³ Nevertheless, adapting the model of Benedict Anderson, medievalists including Glenn Burger, Kathleen Davis, Patricia Ingham, and Kathy Lavezzo have begun to explore Chaucer’s national imagination, whether conscious or unconscious, by analyzing not only Chaucer’s representation of England as a nation but also his perspectives on nationhood’s distinguishing features, such as exclusivity, sovereignty, history, futurity, common language, and identity.⁴ Building on their work, this essay seeks to explain how Christian nobility crystallizes as a particular form of class-crossing national identity in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale, his only Arthurian romance. There in the legendary British past, the Wife of Bath interposes Dante Alighieri’s understanding of nobility as a matter of character distinct from aristocratic lineage and wealth and tied instead to Christ’s own goodness. Borrowing from the Italian Trecento to edify Arthurian England, the Wife of Bath ultimately redefines English nobility as a national form of identity available to different classes and genders within English Christian bounds. Thus the Wife uses internationalism as a technique to subvert aristocratic identity with cross-class/cross-gender national identity.

Set in King Arthur’s fairy-filled sixth-century Britain, The Wife of Bath’s Tale tethers Christian nobility to the genre of Arthurian romance, signaling its investment in courtly love and hence in a certain set of class and gender relations that promulgate romantic love and female sovereignty as transcendent ideals. Yet the further we read the more disputable and mundane these “ideals” appear.⁵ The romance suddenly undermines its ideals with the opening rape, and later with the claim that women want sovereignty more than love and can find it within a married household that celebrates both affection and the crossing of gender and class lines. In Chaucer’s poetry, love acts as the central concept subtending marriage and the household, two overlapping national institutions that have their own philosophical and political bearing on the concept of sovereignty—and on the grand institution of the state.⁶ As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri remind us, love has long been understood as more than a feeling: “love is an essential concept for philosophy and politics.” Although they do not cite Chaucer by name, Hardt and Negri do acknowledge a debt to medieval understandings of love as they refuse to “[l]eave it to the poets to speak of love.”⁷ Likewise, Chaucer refuses to leave it to kings, jurists, philosophers, and Italians (like Dante, whom Hardt and Negri do mention) to debate the politics of love and sovereignty. In the Wife of Bath’s experience, such debates belong in the heart of the household, in the bedroom, near the hearth, and always in the English vernacular.

Throughout The Canterbury Tales, sovereignty describes the legitimate power governing a hierarchical relationship, and it indicates shared ownership and judgment.⁸ Chaucer’s Matter of Britain romances, The Man of Law’s Tale and The Wife of Bath’s Tale, both define nationhood through ideals of sovereignty and plots centered on marriage. The Middle English Dictionary records the first uses of the word soverainte in the fourteenth century. At this time, sovereignty indicated a moderate range of powers and authority applicable in spiritual, political, and romantic contexts.⁹ Academic political thinkers were actively engaged in distinguishing spiritual sovereignty from temporal sovereignty, divine sovereignty from papal sovereignty, papal sovereignty from regnal sovereignty, and...