1. Franchise (fraunchise) refers to the social status of a free person, but in this tale, more specifically to “nobility of character, generosity of spirit.” The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, third edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), glossary. All references to “The Franklin’s Tale” and “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” are from this edition.
2. Symbolic capital refers to any ability or asset considered as being valuable by a given group of people. The primary forms of symbolic capital are labor and landed property, which may be converted “to gain advantages in the form of additional wealth, power, allies and marriage partners.” Rebecca Bliege Bird and Eric Alden Smith, “Signaling Theory, Strategic Interaction, and Symbolic Capital,” Current Anthropology 46:2 (April 2005): 221–48, quote on p. 223. Because symbolic capital implies differences between status and identities, its value lies in the cost of the investment in terms of time, energy, or wealth.
3. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1990), pp. 112–13.
4. The Riverside Chaucer, p. 900, notes that although “Chaucer follows Jerome closely, he places his examples in a different order.” The same endnote adds that Donald C. Baker, “A Crux in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale: Dorigen’s Complaint,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 60 (1960): 56–64, “argues that the exempla are organized into women who commit suicide to avoid rape (1367–1404), women who commit suicide after being raped (1405–38), and notably faithful wives (1439–56).”
5. Jane Tibbetts Schulenberg is instructive on this issue in her “The Heroics of Virginity: Brides of Christ and Sacrificial Mutilation,” in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), pp. 29–72.