#also forever loling at Chaucer naming The Wife 'Alisoun' and giving her a husband named Jankyn lmfao

[wonder-worker]

Within this broader condemnation of [Alice Perrers'] behaviour, a number of specific themes can be identified. These include sexual immorality, political influence, and [...] numerous and repeated references to greed and avarice. This is particularly striking in two literary representations which may have been inspired by Alice: Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and, most compelling, William Langland’s Lady Meed in his allegorical poem Piers Plowman, a character whose name has become a byword for venality. Meed, like Alice, established her presence at the royal court and acted as a counsellor to the king, but was eventually banished on accusations of being a whore and undermining the workings of law and justice. In particular, in introducing Meed to his audience, Langland describes her hands as covered with rings of the “purest perreize,” a word meaning precious stones or jewels, which would seem to be a play on Alice’s surname, Perrers, and thus directly identifying her with Meed. Chaucer also notably named the wife in the Wife of Bath Alisoun, raising the possibility that she was in part based on his direct contemporary Alice Perrers. The Wife had a husband named Jankyn, similar to the name of Alice’s first husband, Janyn, and was a businesswoman with a mercantile and urban background, echoing Alice’s own early life in London. The Wife was notoriously prolific in her lustful desires, but invariably they had a financial motivation, fusing, in the words of Paul Strohm, “the categories of economic and sexual assertiveness into a single epitome of contemporary male dread.”

-Laura Tompkins, '"Edward III's Gold-Digging Mistress": Alice Perrers, Gender, and Financial Power at the English Royal Court, 1360-1377", "Women and Economic Power in Premodern Courts" (edited by Cathleen Sarti)

#historicwomendaily #alice perrers #english history #edward iii #my post #geoffrey chaucer #to be clear 'being inspired by' doesn't mean 'being a direct analogue of' #so we obviously shouldn't (and Tompkins doesn't) look at it through that angle #also just to clarify - Langland's 'Lady Meed' is a little more complicated. #as per our current understanding of the chronology of his writing: #his 'A text' of Piers Plowman was most likely written in the late 1460s - almost a decade before the parliamentary proceedings against Alic #and thus cannot have been based purely on her but on a wider 'discourse of defamation focused on “problem” women' as Ormrod puts it #HOWEVER we know that Langland redrafted and massively edited the B and C texts from the book much later #and as Matthew Giancarlo and Gwilym Dodd have pointed out there are clear indications he was specifically influenced by Alice's #encounters with Parliament in the 1470s when it came to these texts #also forever loling at Chaucer naming The Wife 'Alisoun' and giving her a husband named Jankyn lmfao #that's hilariously on the nose #but also if they truly were inspired by Alice that's such an epic slay on her part #icon