In Geoffrey Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale", the wife herself, a liberal feminist of her time, uses primarily irony to attack the church and convey her own unconventional ideas on female sovereignty and independent thinking to the audience. The opening of her tale begins with the magical history of England and the banishment of fairies: "All this wide land was land of faery/... But now no man can see the elves, you know/For now the so-great charity and prayers of limiters and other holy friars" (3-4, 8-10). The narrator's questionable praise of the church for driving out fairies shows verbal irony through the word "holy"(10) and the phrase "so-great charity"(9). When the audience ponders these words, which are cleverly placed directly behind the narrators own nostalgic remembrances of a time filled with fairies, it is the wife's intention that a change of character by way of showing sorrow towards the freedom and magic that the church destroys become instilled upon the reader. Furthermore, the wife goes into a more parodic ridicule of the church through examples of mock safety such as, "In noons and afternoon and in the mornings,/ saying his matins and such holy things/... Women may now go safely down/...There is no other incubus than he and would do them nothing but dishonour/ And so befell it that this kind Arthur had at his court a lusty bachelor'" (20-22, 24-27). "Women may now go safely down"(22) and "There is no other incubus than he and would do them nothing but dishonour" 24-25) are two examples of verbal irony. It is also ironic that there is a transition directly from the holy man to "a lusty bachelor"(27). One may note the lecherous reputations of the squire, which would clearly appear to be less safe than the presence of a fairy. In a slight play on words, the narrator is referring to the fact that the holy men i...