Discourse and Dominion in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue

In the following paper we will investigate the power of discourse in medieval text, with a particular reference to a fragment of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath Prologue. In the context of the New Historicist paradigm of approaching the medieval text, our research explores the dialectic of selfhood and its discourse within the cultural and social constructs of the Middle Ages at the end of the fourteenth century in England. The focus is on the concept of authority in the medieval texts and the textualization of history in the context of the tension between the speaking subject and the objectified historical identity.