Chaucer always seems to be constructing complicated edifices with trap doors and trick bookcases, and the Wife of Bath's prologue is no exception. Aside from his characteristic "blameth nat me" near the beginning ("If that I speke after my fantasye/as taketh not agrief of that I seye/for mine entente nys but for to pleye." lines 190-192) and the way in which the whole thing is a massive looping digression, almost wholly unrelated to the rather pat tale itself, I lit upon this passage as particularly interesting. Chaucer sets up clerks and lovers as diametrically opposed: "Each falleth in otheres exaltacioun /and thus, God woot, Mercurie is desolat/In Pisces, where Venus is exaltat/and Venus falleth ther Mercurie is reysed./Therfore no womman of no clerk is preysed." (lines 702-706) Isn't this another instance of Chaucer, as the 'mindlessly scribbling' clerk, slyly undercutting his words? In highlighting the narratorial bias, does he mitigate what the story depicts? Does he truly believe in the venal, scheming women of his framework, or is it only another puffed-up parody?