Chaucer's Wenches

Abstract:This essay analyzes the eighteen occurrences of the word wenche in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and argues that the idea of the "wenche" persists today, most notably as implicit justification for the rescinding of the constitutional right to an abortion in the US Supreme Court's monumental decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (June 2022). It takes a Black feminist approach by situating Chaucer's wenches in the context of Black women's history and tracing how the word's resonances continued their pernicious work of making meaning and shaping material realities long after the Middle Ages. It first gives a careful history of wench's origins and accretion of meaning from the early to the late Middle Ages, paying particular attention to its relationship with the Latin ancilla. It uses the Wycliffite Bible as a lens to explore the term's rapidly accruing connotations of youth, servitude, femininity, and transgressive sexuality, and discusses the connections between "wenche" and reproduction in An Alphabet of Tales and Geoffrey the Grammarian's Promptorium parvulorum before tracing its symbolic freight across the Canterbury Tales and pointing to its underlying role in struggles for reproductive justice in our own time.