Wife of Bath

After reading The Wife of Bath several times, the description of the lady was very clear. Using the words from the excerpt, I could paint a picture her in my head. The excerpt describes her physical appearance, personality, physical limitations and strengths, experience in other cultures, and what others around her thought about her. Even though she suffered from the disability of deafness, she didn’t let that control her which could define her as a strong women. In fact she seemed to use her other senses more to compensate for the loss of hearing. This is characterized in her ability to create very beautiful clothing that stood out. She also cared about how she appeared in public. It seemed that nothing but perfection was acceptable to her. The Wife of Bath seems be from a very well-respected family which carried with her when this was written. She was also very confident and showed no fear to the eye of the public, which could exemplify a position of power she had. For instance, in the excerpt she would get mad if someone would take the offering before her in church. If it did occur, punishment would be bestowed on the community. She also did a lot of traveling where she would learn a great deal of knowledge along the way. Armed with this knowledge and experience, she was able to socialize with people that would love her.

Where Chaucer used words to illustrate a person, the Limbourg brothers used illustrations to represent life during those times. The illustration does a good job showing how a peasant farm is ran during the winter. The picture gave me the feeling of a very cold winter day. Similar to what we are going through today. The sky is dark, there are neatly covered trees, roofs, and beehives, which could be indicative of the snow just falling. Also, a couple details in the painting of how cold the day is could be the peasant running with the hands covering the mouth, perhaps blowing hot breath on them, and the sheep grouped...