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Jankyn is the Wife of Bath’s fifth husband, a young clerk from Oxford. He is the Wife’s favorite husband, implicitly because of how she can overmaster him. The Wife of Bath seems to easily become the dominant figure in her other marriages through her shrewd rhetoric and cunning. Handsome Jankyn, however, comes into the marriage with strong misogynistic ideas in keeping with the common medieval attitude toward women. As a scholar, Jankyn is well-read in the anti-woman philosophy of the day, even keeping a book full of tales of wicked women. Implicitly, he reads her these stories to assert dominance over her, shifting the power dynamic in their house back into medieval orthodoxy. Although he responds violently to the Wife of Bath’s destruction of his book, his horror at hurting her so greatly suggests that despite his desire to assert power in their relationship, he may not be particularly comfortable with violence. His willingness to cede power transforms him into the Wife of Bath’s ideal husband: young, handsome, and submissive to her whims. This transformation mirrors the transformation of the Knight in the Wife of Bath’s Tale. Both begin with a violent desire to dominate women but end up submissive, to the benefit of their marriages.
