Gat-toothed was she...



The Wife of Bath

While talking today about the description of the Wife of Bath in the 'General Prologue' to The Canterbury Tales, we briefly discussed the gap between her two front teeth:

Gat-toothed was she, soothly for to saye.     ( l.470)

In Chaucer's time this was seen as a sign of an amorous character. I also mentioned that gap-toothed models, like Lara Stone and Georgia Jagger, are now becoming very fashionable - and that models are even paying dentists and surgeons to separate their teeth. Most of you looked at me as though I had gone mad. Well, here is the story.



Georgia Jagger - distant relative
of the Wife of Bath?

 Secondly, and more seriously, I’d recommend this website for working on your Chaucer assignments. Here you can find the descriptions of the individual pilgrims. Look on the left of the webpage, and click on your pilgrim. You then have the original Middle English, and a modern translation.

Finally, here's a link to an interesting website about the Wife of Bath hosted by the University of North Carolina. In particular, it looks at the 'good Wif' in relation to medieval ideas about virginity. As Jane Zatta observes there, 'by challenging the value of virginity, the Wife of Bath calls into question both secular and religious ideals of women.'