The exaltation of women is one of the commonest conventions of medieval poetry. The beloved object of sexual love provides a focus and inspiration for courtly delicacy and chivalric enterprise. The bounty and compassion of a Virgin Mary or Goddess Nature provide a model for social relations, compensating the uncertainties of human order and mitigating the rigor of male authority. But the idealizing of more simply human female figures is often fundamentally exploitative, serving not so much to affirm the inherent value of woman as to dignify the masculine chivalry that exalts it. To be thus exalted is to be isolated from normal human relations, subjected to a standard of purity whose very rigidity expresses the fears that lurk beneath the veneer of reverence. For with the ideal image of woman there coexists the “realistic” view of an irrational creature of whim and appetite, constantly in need of the discipline of superior male judgment. Between these opposing views there is little or no middle ground. The social function of woman is sufficiently defined by male-generated strictures on purity and wifely duty so that no autonomous image of woman exists and “feminism” is inconceivable.

Three of the tales treated in this chapter, those of the Man of Law, Clerk, and Physician, exhibit the idealizing view of woman, exposing with increasing irony the self-serving male motives that inform it. In a fourth, the Wife of Bath, the first of Chaucer's female narrators, assails the tradition that defines women's role so narrowly.