Chaucer was commissioned to write The Canterbury Tales for the ribald enjoyment of an English Nobleman.
The Canterbury Tales is a work of fiction.
Why then do scholars take The Canterbury Tales seriously as the way medieval English women behaved?
There was no Wife of Bath. There was no woman, no composite of women, no woman in caricature in medieval England who had five husbands and was working on more. No woman who loved best the one, the fifth, who beat her black and blue and who bruised her ribs."Yet, according to the Wife," bullshit, no "according to the wife," according to Geoffrey Chaucer writing the sexual fantasies of another man who was paying him.
The Canterbury Tales sheds zero light on the life of medieval Englishwomen. They are the exquisite, amusing, sadomasochistic, misogynistic, pornographic imaginings of an English nobleman as rendered by an artful scribe.