The Wife of Bath
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 17 January 2023
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Chaucer's widow and clothmaker is one of three characters given a longer confessional voice than other pilgrims in his Canterbury Tales and she uses her narrative to ask who has had the advantage in setting out the stories of women - "Who peyntede the leon, tel me who?" Shahidha Bari explores both the roots and the influence of Chaucer's creation and the different modern versions created by writers including Zadie Smith and Caroline Bergvall. Her guests are Marion Turner, author of The Wife of Bath: A Biography, Patience Agbabi who reimagines this timeless character as a Nigerian businesswoman in her poem The Wife of Bafa, and New Generation Thinker Hetta Howes.
You can hear Marion Turner discussing Chaucer's own life in a past episode of Free Thinking hearing from nominees for the 2020 Wolfson History Prize https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000j2qw You can find a discussion about Chaucer's court case in an Arts and Ideas podcast episode called A Feminist Take on Medieval History https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06n28wv And Free Thinking has a whole collection of programmes exploring Women in the World all available on BBC Sounds and as Arts & Ideas podcasts https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p084ttwp
Producer: Torquil MacLeod
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Can I just say? |
| 0:01.5 | You're about to listen to a BBC podcast. |
| 0:04.0 | It's such a wonderful listen. |
| 0:05.6 | So nice. |
| 0:06.5 | There are loads more like it on BBC sounds. |
| 0:08.8 | Different paces, different heights. |
| 0:10.6 | The roof is buckling. |
| 0:11.9 | Where you can also listen to live sports commentary. |
| 0:14.2 | It's right foot goes for goal. |
| 0:16.7 | And then enjoy even more podcasts full of analysis and reaction to the big stories. |
| 0:21.7 | The stat that is astonishing is they ended with the lowest amount of possession. |
| 0:25.2 | And she's had to live with that. |
| 0:26.8 | So if you love sport, a passion, it's almost like a religion. |
| 0:29.7 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:31.8 | Sort of expecting that every week now. |
| 0:34.7 | Hello, there are 24 pilgrims in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, each of them sharing a story as they wender their way to the sacred cathedral city. The most memorably vivacious of them is Alison, the wife of Bath. Find out more about her in today's Arts and Ideas podcast with me, Shahed Abari, and my guests just after this. |
| 0:54.3 | I'm Tom Service, and on the Listening Service every week, I explore a universe of musical |
| 1:01.4 | connections, sounds, ideas and emotions that bind Gustav Marler to Miley Cyrus, Anna Meredith |
| 1:09.6 | to Wolfgang Amaday Mozart, classroom recorders to the |
| 1:13.6 | Mandalorian soundtrack, Claude Debussy to Freddie Mercury, Johannes Brahms to Rick Wakeman. You've just got to lose your inhibitions about what genre it is, who wrote it, played it and when, and realise that the whole musical universe |
| 1:29.7 | is right there, that it belongs to all of us and connects us all. All we've got to do is dive in |
| 1:36.5 | and listen. Rethink, classical music with me, Tom Service, on The Listening Service, on BBC |
... |
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