Sorry, Desdemona. I knew you were a medievalist but had forgotten!

Sorry if my comment rubbed you the wrong way, MAG. I had honestly forgotten who had posted before, and since I now download the threads in chunks of 50 posts, it's on another screen. But I don't really need to know what Goia Timpanelli said about it, and I know what sovereignty means.

If you are referring to the storyteller Gioia Timpanelli, modern professional storytellers are great for entertaining and enlightening fun, but generally unreliable as analysts of tales from different times and places. Their opinions certainly can't change the texts themselves. Like Desdemona, I have sufficient training in medieval English literature to interperet these texts for myself, though two of my degrees are in Folklore. In any case it's not something that bears much interpretation considering the explicitness of the extant texts, which as I demonstrated express quite amply that what women want is mastery over men, not merely some measure of control over their own lives. The relevant quotations are posted earlier in this thread.

By the way, if you refuse to support your argument by saying that I need to do the background reading to be worthy of your time, I and everyone else will likely take it as a tacit admission that you're wrong. I could as easily have said "your interpretation is wrong but I won't tell you why until you look up the quotations from 'The Wedding of Sir Gawain and dame Ragnell' and 'The Wife of Bath's Tale.'" Instead, I did spend the time, looked up the quotations myself, and provided them for you.

So why not just tell me what Gioia Timpanelli said? That would be a discussion.