The Canterbury Tales: The Wife of Bath's Prologue Literature and Writing Quotes Page 2

Glossing was the activity of explaining a text. By referring to it here in relation to the purpose of the genitals, the Wife implies that she's drawing her information about this from scholarly texts. But in line 130, she deploys life experience in opposition to these texts' conclusions, continuing her method of pitting "auctoritee" against experience.

Here the Wife demonstrates selective amnesia in her recitation of Biblical texts: the words of Paul actually give husbands and wives power over one another's bodies. The Wife, however, desires absolute power over both her husband and herself, so conveniently forgets to mention the other part of Paul's text.

The idea that one ought to take others' lives of an example was one that was heavily connected to literature and writing, because the examples contained in literature were supposed to be directions for one's own life.