End of Week 2/ Begining of Week 3

In class today I decided that I'm pretty sure I didn't do nearly enough in my last post! So I'm here now to take a deeper look into women in the 14th century. Checking out a website I googled I found
http://www.unc.edu/depts/chaucer/zatta/14thcent.html
which contains some interesting background to the time in which Chaucer was writing. England was at war for almost the whole century. King Richard was 28 when he married the princess of France, who was daughter of King Phillip the VI. This was a political move to help end the French Wars. Sounds fine until you find out that she was eight years old! Perhaps girls were more chattel than children. That is supported by the Wife of Bath's prologue where she tells that she was married by 12.

I got to wondering also if it was custom to marry and remarry. Was it necessary at the time for a woman to be married? Was it dishonorable to be a widow? http://www.jstor.org/view/07382480/ap030043/03a00130/0
This website was exactly what I was looking for! It even posed the same question in the first sentence. The conclusion the author offers is that it was more profitable politically for the woman to stay widowed rather than remarry, but if she wished to have a family and run a business, or perhaps just liked being married, she could certainly marry again. If she did marry again she would be giving up her equal rights with men again and handing them over to her current husband. The author also brings up the point we discussed briefly in class today, namely that if a woman was widowed her reputation would be very vulnerable. It was much better to be married and have an affair than to be unmarried and have relations with any man. The Wife of Bath seems to like being married, having sex, and using it as her power. I believe she may have liked the thrill of sex because she played a game with her husbands so often. I think I'll read up on that and use it as a topic for a discussion board post.