Sophie Gee

Now, the translation says meals, but they're talking about her eating meat.

We've got a picture of this sort of ostensibly delicate woman sort of hoeing into a side of beef.

She let no morsel from her lippers fall.

Now, we wouldn't.

We don't spell the words like that anymore.

We don't name body parts in that same way.

But there's something about this image of a woman trying to kind of conceal her lips from people's sight so that no one can see her eating.

And then she doesn't wet her fingers in her sauce deep.

Again, you know, the translations always change that so that the fingers aren't getting wet or that the source is something other than deep.

But it kind of just tells us all we need to know both about her and about the other people in the world who are wetting their fingers in their source deep.

And so it goes on, you know, she could carry a morsel and she could keep that no drop fell upon her breast.

And the language itself carries this kind of sensory imagery of people saying,

One of the things I've always found totally fascinating about Chaucer is the way he's conveying a world of people grappling and contending, contesting with the realities of their bodies, trying to fight against having bodies, having physical lives.

And that juxtaposition between the intensity of the physical in the medieval world and the human desire to somehow kind of make it go away and dignify it and poshify it, it's always playing out in the language, I think.

Yes, exactly.

She's an astonishingly, well, bodily bawdy character in the Canterbury Tales.

So when she comes to tell her tale, it turns out that basically she's the first literary feminist.

She has been married five times.

She refuses to comply with the rules of decorous, courtly women who behave themselves and are quiet and who are sort of in mourning for their husbands and

who sort of won't say anything bad about the men to whom they've been wed and so on and so on.