Chaucer’s Wife of Bath Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales were filled with memorable characters, including the often-married Wife of Bath, shown here in a fifteenth-century manuscript. In the prologue that details her life, she denies the value of virginity and criticizes her young and handsome fifth husband for reading a book about “wicked wives.” “By God, if women had but written stories . . . ,” she comments, “They would have written of men more wickedness / Than all the race of Adam could redress.”

(Private Collection/Bridgeman Images)