Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts

' ... it is impossible / That any clerk wol speke good of wyves.' Behind the words of Chaucer's Wife of Bath lies a vast corpus of medieval misogynistic writings. These texts, which range from those of the Church Fathers to a rich array of vernacular literature, have had a profound influence on the status of women in the west. Yet, despite the recent surge of investigations into women's situation, no one book has sought to collect together the key voices of medieval antifeminism, let alone to pr…