The Wife of Bath is the most vibrant character in The Canterbury Tales��nd arguably the most famous. In creating his brilliant portrayal of the talkative wife, Chaucer weaves a
dazzling array of allusions to biblical, classical, patristic, and vernacular sources. These two volumes��he most recent contribution to the Variorum Chaucer series��ntegrate six hundred
years of scholarship on The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale.Editors Mark Allen and John H. Fisher present a comprehensive record of the textual traditions of the tale and of the
critical commentary from the earliest manuscripts to the mid-1990s. Part A (the first volume) includes the text of Chaucer's poem, accompanied by exhaustive collation of the ten most valuable
manuscript witnesses to the text and all twenty-two of the major editions. Also included in Part A are an introduction to the text, and extensive discussions of sources and analogues, genres,
theoretical approaches, and major themes. A bibliographical index concludes the scholarly apparatus in Part A. In Part B (the second volume), the editors present a line-by-line, often
word-by-word, record of the legacy of Chaucer's text, including variants, glosses, editors' notes, and observations by scholars through the ages.
