1. Richard F. Jones, “A Conjecture on the Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 24 (1925): 512–47
2. Robert A. Pratt, “The Development of the Wife of Bath,” in Studies in Medieval Literature, ed. MacEdward Leach (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961): 45–79
3. William W. Lawrence, “Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale,” Speculum 33 (1958): 56–68
4. William W. Lawrence, “The Wife of Bath and the Shipman,” Modern Language Notes 72 (1957): 87–88.
5. See MED, s.v. “revelous,” “revelry” Although the MED defines the word as “disposed to revelry, merry,” and defines “revelrie” as “amusement, diversion, pleasure,” the word “revelour” is used with pejorative connotations in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue (III. 453) and in the Cook’s Tale (“Perkyn revelour”). Furthermore, other virtuous women in the tales are separated from adjectives that do not suggest gravity and propriety. For example, Canacee in the Squire’s Tale (V. 360ff.) and Virginia in the Physician’s Tale (VI. 61) are distanced from “revelry.” Here I pursue the argument, forcefully and eloquently articulated by Mary Carruthers, “The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions,” PMLA 94 (1979): 209–22, that the rules outlined for women in books of deportment are themselves subject to qualification when transferred to the domain of the late fourteenth-century household.