Professor Marion Turner
speaker
759 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 29 May
Professor Marion Turner’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And I think this interest in perspective can be linked to the rise of artistic perspective at exactly this time.
Chaucer would have seen Giotto's art, for instance, when he travelled in Italy.
So he's really interested in using literary character to explore subjectivity and ambiguity.
Secondly, he made his characters much more 3D than previous characters in literature, especially his female characters.
The Wife of Bath is based on characters from Latin and French texts who were stereotypes, cynical old prostitutes.
Chaucer's version is far more nuanced.
She's much funnier and more appealing.
She has a memory and a sense of the future.
She talks about domestic violence and she talks explicitly about the lack of female voices in literature.
In Troilus and Crusade 2, Chaucer changes the character of the heroine.
In Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, Chaucer's source, Crusade is a fickle, promiscuous betrayer.
Chaucer, though, shows us the powerlessness and vulnerability of Crusade's situation, reveals the patterns of her thought and her constrained options, makes her a much more rounded and sympathetic character.
He's interested in depicting character's complexity and interiority, especially women's.
Other authors sometimes disapproved of this.
In the 15th century, Henriksen wrote a sequel to Troilus and Crusade, in which Crusade is punished by becoming a prostitute with a venereal disease.
Later artists such as Pier Paolo Pasolini turned the wife of Bath into a monstrous stereotype.
Chaucer's concern with depicting complex female characters is one of his great achievements and makes him stand out both from his contemporaries and from many of his successors.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's so interesting.
And that whole sense of perspective, of shifting, you know, how do you see things, really fundamental to Chaucer's poetry.
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