1. NEW HISTORICISM
Chelsea Baker

2. ABOUT THE THEORY
 Began about 1980
 Influenced by Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose
 American English and romantic poetry
 What makes it new:
Informed by poststructuralist and reader response theory of 1970
Less fact and event oriented
Less likely to see history as linear and progressive
Unlikely to suggest that a literary text has a single or easily
identifiable historical context
 Broadly define the discipline of history
 View history as a social science and the social sciences as being
properly historical.
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3. THEORISTS
 Jerome McGann
 The first to articulate the New Historicism insight in 1985
 Guided the historical criticism in a powerful comeback
 Paul Strohm
 Hochon’s Arrow (1992)
 Accomplishments have broken down the distinctions among
literary, religious, political, and historical text.
 Lee Patterson
 Chaucer and the Subject of History (1991)
 Explores subjectivity and the claims of the historical world.
 Key question: “What is the wife of bath?” in relation to
history.

4. THEORISTS
 Clifford Geertz
 Influenced New Historicists to believe that “ literature is
not a sphere apart or distinct from history that is relevant
to it”.
 Presented the background information
 You need to know this to fully appreciate the separate
world of art.
 Geertz would use a “thick description”.
 Did this to blur distinctions between history, social
sciences, background and foreground, historical/literary
materials, political and poetical events.

5. NEW HISTORICISM
 Goals:
 Understand the literary text through its historical context
 Understand cultural and intellectual history through literature
 New Historicism…
 Is a more neutral approach to historical events, and culturally
sensitive.
 Reminds us that is difficult to reconstruct the past for what it really
was.

6. ANALYSIS
 “Experience woot well it is noght so”: Marriage and the Pursuit
of Happiness in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale.
 Lee Patterson
 Goals:
 Reconstruct a text’s original meaning.
 Use historical evidence to answer questions about the wife of bath.
 Understand what Chaucer included in the text, and what he left out.
 The past is only a reconstruction
 Influenced by interpretations and assumptions

7. ANALYSIS
 Patterson critiques the wife of bath based off of
Alisoun's:
 Social Class
 Rich, ex-husbands riches, personal income
 Alisoun was portrayed as a weaver/business owner, clothing
line
 Titles
 Wife/widow
 Stereotypes of women
 Made her a weaver, common job for women
 Went against the mother stereotype
 Chaucer depends on literary tradition rather than historical
specifity
 Defined by her relationships

8. ANALYSIS
 Alisoun as a wife:
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Goes against the medieval marriage norm
Does not bear children
She is reducing the idea of women as property
Commerce is at the center of the wife’s interest
 Makes husbands pay for sex
 To her courtship is negotiating at the market.
 Manipulates men into marriage

9. ANALYSIS
 Alisoun as wife:
 Two ways to gain a valid marriage in medieval times
 Spoken word of the present; similar to what weddings are like
now
 Word of the future and sexual intercourse
 Conditions:
 Neither partner is already married
 Both partners were legal age (girls 12, boys 14)
 Weren't to closely related.
 Alisoun had 5 husbands, all were valid
 Complex/Contradictory attitudes toward marriage
 Marriage choice, need to choose a spouse by economic and
social status
 Romanticism, true love can be achieved

10. ANALYSIS
 Marriage Property and Wifehood:
 A woman is to be understood in her relationship to a man,
not independent selfhood
 Governing marital property
 Dowry – fortune that wife brought to the marriage
 Jointure – sharing of all fortunes, land, money, etc.
 Chaucer is vague in explaining these in the story
 Chaucer is imprecise with the wife’s property transactions
because they are symbolic
 Property represents less material wealth and personal security
for the wife
 Was not a way for the wife to keep score, the wife mostly
wanted someone to make her feel loved and happy
 The wife had no children- Chaucer never said- chose to
focus on happier realities for the wife
 Not what took away from the wife’s freedom

11. RESOURCES
 Chaucer, G., & Beidler, P. G. (1996). The wife of Bath.
Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press.