Document Type
Article
Version
Author's Final Manuscript
Publication Title
Exemplaria
Volume
37
Publication Date
2025
Abstract
This essay examines Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s demand for “sovereyntee,” a central term around which both her Prologue and Tale rotate. Critics have long disagreed whether Alison’s demand for sovereignty is met, and this essay seeks new ways of thinking about the theoretical contours of her demand. It argues that turning to heretofore unrecognized structures of sovereignty articulated via Indigenous Studies can help us review the feminist politics of the Wife of Bath’s Tale. By reading the Tale’s temporal alternatives to settler timeframes, this essay shows how the Tale revises the structures of justice that seem to exonerate the rapist-knight and trap the “loathly lady” into a traditional marriage. More broadly, this essay demonstrates that those revisions ask medievalists to revise the narrowness of our own scholarly structures, particularly those around agency, justice, and feminism.
Citation
Taylor, Jamie. 2025. “Indigenous Sovereignties in the Wife of Bath’s Tale.” Exemplaria 37 (3): 251–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/10412573.2025.2561530.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/10412573.2025.2561530