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The ideas shaping our lives today - with leading artists and thinkers in extended interview and debate.

Free Thinking: The Wife of Bath

The Wife of Bath

BBC Radio 4 - Free Thinking, The Wife of Bath

Shahidha Bari is joined by Professor Marion Turner, poet Patience Agbabi and Hetta Howes.

The medieval woman from the middling ranks who answers back has fascinated writers from Shakespeare to Voltaire, James Joyce to Zadie Smith, and Marion Turner to Patience Agbabi.

Chaucer's widow and clothmaker is one of three characters given a longer confessional voice than other pilgrims in his Canterbury Tales and she uses her narrative to ask who has had the advantage in setting out the stories of women - "Who peyntede the leon, tel me who?"  Shahidha Bari explores both the roots and the influence of Chaucer's creation and the different modern versions created by writers such as Zadie Smith and Ted Hughes and a film version by Pasolini. Shahidha's guests are Marion Turner, author of The Wife of Bath: A Biography, Patience Agbabi who reimagines this timeless character as a Nigerian businesswoman in her poem The Wife of Bafa, and New Generation Thinker Dr Hetta Howes who teaches at City University, London.  

You can hear Marion Turner discussing Chaucer's own life in a past episode of Free Thinking hearing from nominees for the 2020 Wolfson History Prize  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000j2qw
You can find a discussion about Chaucer's court case in an Arts and Ideas podcast episode with Hetta Howes called A Feminist Take on Medieval History https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06n28wv 
And Free Thinking has a whole collection of programmes exploring Women in the World all available on BBC Sounds and as Arts & Ideas podcasts https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p084ttwp

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

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The Wife of Bath

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