Answers to the sample exam passages:

1. The old woman in Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale" says this at the conclusion of the tale. She has given the knight the choice of having her fowl and faithful or fair and (possibly) unfaithful, and he has decided to let her decide for him. In reward for this response, she tells him that she will be both beautiful and true to him for all their lives.

2. In Part III of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the host's wife says this to Gawain, while they are in bed together. She suggests that by lying in bed with her without giving her a kiss, Gawain is not living up to his own reputation for courtliness, and that he is therefore not truly "Gawain." So, naturally, Gawain kisses her.

3. From the Breton lai "Equitan" by Marie de France. The king, Equitan, is persuading his seneschal's wife to be his lover. He uses the language of romantic devotion, and promises to serve her, and the two of them agree to a relationship based on equality. But in the last sentence of the passage Marie hints at the irony that they will soon fall into a plot to murder the seneschal, and that they will both die as a result.