Rewriting Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale from Dryden, through Voltaire, to Niemcewicz: Medievalism or Modernisation?

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to track down the fortunes of cross-cultural transmission of -century Polish writers on French literary models. Likewise, differences in the representation of gender relationships between Chaucer's romance and its eighteenthcentury versions reveal that the agenda of the eighteenth-century adapters was rather catering to the taste of their contemporaneous readers than engaging with medieval English culture.