Beaten for a Book: Domestic and Pedagogic Violence in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue

[First paragraph] While education is a recurrent theme across Chaucer’s work, the Wife of Bath’s Prologue contains perhaps his fullest engagement with the subject. 2 His portrayal of Alisoun’s fifth husband Jankyn not only provides an important focus for pedagogic concerns, but develops into a complex interrogation of the larger implications of study. Jankyn himself is a virtual personification of formal instruction: as well as being characterised as “clerk of Oxenford” from the moment he appears in the text (III.527), his emphatic youthfulness at “twenty wynter oold” suggests he has little knowledge beyond the classroom (III.600), painting him as “all ‘auctoritee’ and no ‘experience’”. 3 But what complicates Chaucer’s portrayal in particular is the way that learning infuses Jankyn’s behaviour as a husband. Not only does the Prologue conflate wedlock with instruction at several points, most tellingly in Alisoun’s boast “five husbands scoleying am I”, but Jankyn seems to call on the schoolroom to sustain dominance over the Wife (III.45c). His interactions with Alisoun invariably position him as teacher and her as pupil: his harangues from the book of “wykked wyves” are specifically intended to “teche” her, and he is evidently responsible for the detailed knowledge of classical and patristic material she displays (III.643). 4 Even the term Chaucer uses to denote supremacy in the household recalls education. Alisoun’s desired “maistrie” evokes both magister and the specialist learning of clerks: hence it is used in the Seven Sages of Rome (c.1275) to describe “twei clerkes” who have “maistri on honde”, and in Kyng Alisaunder (c.1300) to refer to “clerkes wel ylerede...in her maistre”. 5 Schooling is therefore at the centre of Jankyn’s marriage, both cementing and conceptualising his authority in the household.