The Merchant's Tale critics

• Dr. Alixe Bovey: Women had very few legal rights and were considered to be the 'property' of either their fathers or husbands
• Dr. Alixe Bovey: responsible for man's expulsion from paradise
• Dr. Alixe Bovey: the place of women in society was often dictated by biblical texts
• Dr. Kate Ash-Irisarri: Men were seen as the servants of God, women as the servants of men
• Julia Boffey: There were some women who exercised power, providing a challenge to the stereotypical image of medieval women as oppressed and subservient
• Schlusener: all good feelings [Chaucer's] audience felt about love and marriage are demolished
• Elaine Hansen: [May is] devised out of Januarie's thoughts, just as Eve is out of Adam's
• Dr Barrie Saywood: [In Chaucerian comedy] there are no values, secular or religious, more important than survival or satisfaction of the appetite
• Pearsall: The images of sexual possession [...] give a partly comic effect but always with an undertone of disgust and repulsion
• Pearsall: January is granted a kind of deformed moral consciousness so he is constantly preoccupied with whether what he is doing is right or lawful. [The amoral tale reduces] all human behaviour to lust and greed
• John Hathaway: The real snare in this raucous tale is not marriage, but the prison of his own desire
• Laura Varnam: Chaucer's garden in this tale is no longer a place of courtly love or intellectual debate, but of lust and sexuality
• Stephanie A. Tolliver: January has a strictly mercantile interest in May