MEDIEVAL WOMEN AND PATRIARCHAL AGORAPHOBIA: CHAUCER’S THE PRIORESS AND THE WIFE OF BATH

Spatial limitations have been among the means used by patriarchal societies to assert control over women’s gender and sexuality. Similarly, the patriarchal society controlled women’s spatial practices in medieval England. Both the secular women and the religious women were prone to spatial limitations that were regulated according to their social and sexual statuses. While the enclosure was at the core of a religious woman’s life at the nunnery, a secular woman’s moving beyond her village or city was severely criticized in the Middle Ages. Patriarchal agoraphobia defined such women in the open space as “open space,” implying their sexual vulnerability. However, from the fourteenth century onwards, both secular and religious women began rejecting such spatial limitations as exemplified by the Prioress and the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Accordingly, blending Henri Lefebvre’s ideas on the production of space with Victor Turner’s ideas about liminality, this article aims to discuss how medieval women challenged, through their spatial practices, the idea that women in the open space were defined as “the open space” through an analysis of the spatial practices of the Prioress and the Wife of Bath.