Where would the Wife of Bath (from Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales) be placed in Dante's vision of hell, in Dante's Inferno, by Dante Alighieri...

If I were to place the Wife of Bath, from Chaucer's
The Canterbury Tales somewhere in Dante's hell, it would be in the
second circle, that of lust.

We learn in The Prologue of
the Wife of Bath. She has been on several pilgrimages, having gone three times to
Jerusalem and once to Rome, among other places. She is first in line in her "parish" to
give her offering at church. While she goes through all the motions
of being a virtuous woman, and no one can fault her for her dealings with other people,
she is not "chaste" and demure, as a good wife or widow should
be.

The Wife of Bath has been married a number of
times:

She was
a worthy woman all her life;

Five times at the church door
had see been a wife...
(355-356)

Chaucer's
introduction of this character goes on to note...

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Perhaps she knew love remedies, for
she

Had danced the old game long and cunningly.
(371-372)

What we learn in
The Prologue is that the Wife of Bath is no stranger to love or
marriage—long knowing that "dance"—and has been married several
times. However, the fact that these marriages do not include "other
company in youth," ...seems to indicate that not all of her
relationships have enjoyed the church's matrimonial
blessings.

In The Canterbury Tales, we
come to the Wife's tale. Before she begins to tell the story requested of her, she
informs her audience of fellow pilgrims that she married first when she was twelve. She
informs the company that she is looking for husband number six. (They have all died: the
inference is that she wore them out in the bedroom.) She says that God created people,
and created sex for them to enjoy. She enjoys it. As for marrying
again, she believes this is God's plan for her life: to marry. She also feels it is her
right to control the marriage, keeping her husbands off-balance by accusing them of
wrong-doings, in which case each does his best to convince her that she is wrong by
giving her many gifts. As a result, she is a woman used to getting her way, and is quite
wealthy as well.

The wife tries to illustrate the upside to
marriage. The Wife's story is about one of Arthur's knights who "ravishes" a woman and
is sentenced to die. The Queen intercedes and asks that she and the ladies of her court
deal with his punishment—and in doling it out, the youth must travel the land for a year
to find the answer to the question, "What is it that women truly
want?"

On the last day, he meets a hag who
will give him the answer if he gives her a wish. Agreeing, he
reports to the Queen that women want to have their own way, always,
with men. The hag wants the knight to marry her, which he does unwillingly. He complains
that she is old and ugly—he cannot bear it; but then his wife turns
into a beautiful young woman. There are several versions of this part of the tale: she
can be beautiful by day and ugly by night (or vice versa), or beautiful and unfaithful,
or ugly and faithful. Wisely, the knight leaves the choice to her, and he has a
beautiful and faithful wife all the time.

The Wife proves
(she thinks) that looks don't matter when it comes to
pleasing a man—her lure to securing another
husband.

Dante, dealing with a concept as tricky then as
now, characterizes that lust is not
love:

[For]
Dante the line separating lust from love is crossed when one acts on this misguided
desire...

As one of the
"capital" sins, the Wife of Bath would be sentenced to the second
circle of hell for the sin of lust, based on Dante's vision of
hell.