"The Wife of Bath" is one of the most popular stories from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.At the beginning of the tale, a knight rapes a woman.  Although by King Arthur’s kingdom rape is a crime punishable by death, the queen tells the knight if he can find a correct answer to the question of what women want more than anything else she will spare his life. The knight accepts the quest and goes throughout the country asking women what they want more than anything. He never gets a consistent answer until he meets an old hag who says she can tell him for sure, but she says that if she tells him, the knight has to do whatever she wants.

The knight agrees. The old hag tells him that more than anything else, women want sovereignty over their husbands. The knight rushes to the queen to tell her what he’s found out and the queen accepts his answer. The knight goes back to the old hag and she tells him that she wants him to marry her. On their wedding night, the knight is unsatisfied with her because she is ugly and a peasant. The old hag says that she can either become beautiful and unfaithful or ugly and faithful.  The knight gives her the choice, so she becomes both beautiful and faithful and they lie happily ever after.

That’s the story.  But before it starts, the Wife of Bath tells her story before the knight came along in her prologue. She talks about how her young husband Janekin always reads her stories about wives who betray their husbands. She states the importance of the storyteller in what gets told in a story and how people are portrayed. She talks about the reason she tore out pages from his book and then begins to talk about how negative stories about women are around in the first place.

The Wife speaks about how it is impossible for clerks to speak well of wives, but how they can speak well of saints. She goes onto say that although clerks never speak well of women, women wouldn’t speak well of men, either, if the roles were reversed. If women had written tales of men, she says, they would write of such wickedness, they would outdo even Adam’s wickedness. Next, she speaks about Mercury, representing clerks, and Venus, representing wives, who oppose each other in every way possible because of their opposite dispositions. This is why clerks never write good things about wives. If a wife were to read something positive about herself, it would please her, therefore making him unhappy.

The prologue also creates tensions about the goodness of men and the wickedness of women. Chaucer makes two arguments about this. The first is that every wife knows so much about the wickedness of her husband and about all men that she could write many books. He backs this up with the stuff about the church. However, he also makes an argument about wives and women caring only about shallow things like money and merriment, while men care about changing the world with wisdom and science.