Ever since the triumphant debut of the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, few literary characters have led such colorful lives or matched her influence or capacity for reinvention in poetry, drama, fiction, and film. Harvard Assistant Professor of English Anna Wilson and Marion Turner, author of The Wife of Bath: A Biography, will discuss how Chaucer’s character related to real medieval women, and where her many travels have taken her since the fourteenth century—from Falstaff and Molly Bloom to a pub in Willesden, #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter.
Marion Turner is the J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford, where she is a Professorial Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. Her books include the prize-winning biography Chaucer: A European Life.
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A.R.T.’s Civically Speaking series features virtual conversations, lectures, and performance events on history, politics, justice, and the meaning of democracy.
