600 years later, this ‘nasty woman’ is still stirring up trouble

Some couples bicker about money. Some about sex. For Alison and her fifth husband, Jankyn, the trouble was a book - like one of those bestsellers promoted on Fox News about the evils of feminism. Jankyn was always reading aloud hoary passages he particularly loved.

Exasperated with him banging on about wicked wives, Alison finally reached over and tore out a page. At that, Jankyn hit her so hard she lost her hearing in one ear.

Nevertheless, she persisted. In fact, 600 years later, we’re still listening to Alison, better known as the Wife of Bath. It doesn’t matter if you’ve ever read Geoffrey Chaucer’s medieval classic “The

Canterbury Tales.” Over the centuries, the Wife of Bath has been swinging her hips through Western culture, knocking princesses off their pedestals, shocking prudes and clearing a path for savvy, witty women. With her brash physicality and subversive humor, she’s the ur-grandma of every “nasty woman,” from Shakespeare’s Mistress Overdone to James Joyce’s Molly Bloom, comedian Amy Schumer and TLC’s “MILF Manor” cougars.

This winter, by some felicitous coincidence, the Wheel of Fortune has delivered two delightful books about Alison. One, “The Wife of Willesden,” is an exuberant, modern-day play by the novelist Zadie Smith. The other, “The Wife of Bath,” is an illuminating analysis by Oxford University professor Marion Turner, who published a critically acclaimed biography of Chaucer in 2019.

Fans of “The Canterbury Tales” don’t need any further enticements. The moment they hear about these titles, “thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages” to the nearest bookstore. But I’m out to convince those of you still traumatized from when you had to recite the opening of the prologue - in Middle English! - in front of your classmates.

I hear you. Some nights I still wake up, my heart banging, remembering a graduate school professor who relentlessly corrected my Midwestern twang, word by word: Whan. That. Aprill. With. His. Shoures. Soote.

Don’t worry: You’re safe now. Turner’s immensely entertaining “biography” will make you fall in love with the Wife of Bath, whom she crowns “the first ordinary woman in English literature.”

And that’s no put-down. By “ordinary,” Turner means “the first mercantile, working, sexually active woman - not a virginal princess or queen, not a nun, witch, or sorceress, not a damsel in distress nor a functional servant character, not an allegory.” No, here in this poem from the year 1400, we discover “a much-married woman and widow, who works in the cloth trade and tells us about her friends, her tricks, her experience of domestic abuse, her long career combating misogyny, her reflections on the ageing process, and her enjoyment of sex.”

Turner’s greatest skill is her ability to present years of arcane research in chapters that are always wonderfully accessible and briskly entertaining.