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It’s easy to revile or romanticize the medieval church as a monolith of religious attitudes. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, however, opens a view to the 1300s of extraordinary richness and color.

The son of a wealthy vintner, Chaucer (1343–1400) lived most of his life at court, serving as a soldier, judge, member of parliament, and ambassador. Chaucer also composed poems and courtly romances, and in later years, his earthy, realistic Canterbury Tales.

The Tales introduce us to roughly two dozen pilgrims making their way to the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury. To amuse themselves, they engage in a storytelling contest.

Chaucer portrays his pilgrims with a vividness and detail unmatched by any British writer before him (or any but Shakespeare and Dickens since), and religious themes color almost every page. Though a work of fiction, Canterbury Tales has helped historians peek into late-1300s English life. Here are sketches of four of Chaucer’s revealing characters.

Flamboyantly dressed, with a hat “broad as a shield,” the sunny, talkative Wife of Bath gallops through the Tales as one of literature’s most endearing religious rebels.

The Wife, Alisoun, was married first at age 12—and then four more times after that. She has outlived all five, speaks of them with rough affection, and waits to “welcome the sixth, whenever he appears.” In the meantime, the Wife carries on a vigorous crusade against the church’s attitudes toward marriage, sexuality, and women.

Having been criticized for her multiple marriages, Alisoun defends her right to marry as long as she can continue to outlive her husbands. Where does the Bible say we can marry only once? Solomon, Abraham, and Jacob were holy men, and none of them stopped at one wife. God himself tells us “to wax and multiply” (she adds, “That gentle text can I well understand”).

She is far from persuaded by the church’s ideal of virginity. Where, she asks, did God ever command that? How could he command virginity without condemning marriage? She knows Saint Paul counseled virginity, “but counseling is no commandment.” And, in a curiously unanswerable argument, she asks,

And certainly if seed were never sown,
How ever could virginity be grown?

In other words, if everyone stays a virgin, we’ll eventually run out of them! Virginity, in any case, is a counsel for those who would live perfectly. “And by your leave,” she demurs, “that am not I.”

The climax of Alisoun’s life comes in a brawl she has with her fifth and favorite husband, Jankyn, over his women-slandering tracts. These tracts, published by the church, collected horrible stories about women in an attempt to persuade young men to eschew marriage for the celibate priesthood. Jankyn, for his amusement, insisted on reading such tracts aloud to his wife. One evening, sick and tired of hearing it, Alisoun tears some pages from the book and punches Jankyn into the fireplace.

Jankyn in turn knocks Alisoun out and then feels so contrite he burns his book and offers up to her all “the mastery, the sovereignty” in their marriage. “After that day,” Alisoun concludes, “we never had debate.”

The authority of the church and the structure of the family are perhaps not such new issues, after all.

She looks every inch the heroine of medieval romance—her nose graceful, her eyes “gray as glass,” her mouth small, soft and red, her forehead fair and broad. As was expected of the nobility, she speaks excellent French—but, Chaucer slyly notes, only as it was taught in England, since the “French of Paris was to her unknown.” This is Chaucer’s Prioress, who clearly missed her calling as a medieval lady.

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