Which adjectives best describe the Wife of Bath in The Canterbury Tales: The Prologue?

A great adjective to describe the Wife of Bath would be independent. As a wealthy widow, she enjoys the kind of independence that was very rare for a woman in those days. Her considerable wealth allows the Wife of Bath to pursue the life of a lady of leisure, using her spare time to travel the length and breadth of Christendom, visiting holy sites of pilgrimage.

But the Wife of Bath is no meek and humble ascetic. Despite her devout faith, she's also rather worldly. Due to her travels and to her many marriages, she's become incredibly wise in the ways of the world. This wisdom manifests itself in a practical, down-to-earth understanding of the world that comes through quite strongly in the elaborate tale she tells.

In The Prologue, it is safe to say the Wife of Bath is depicted as a worldly and experienced woman who is in control of all aspects of her life. 

Several different details present the Wife of Bath as an older woman who has been able to travel and experience much of what life has to offer. She has been lawfully married to five different men throughout her life and has accrued the wealth to travel through the deaths of all five men.

Three times she’d journeyed to Jerusalem;
And many a foreign stream she’d had to stem;
At Rome she’d been, and she’d been in Boulogne,
In Spain at Santiago, and at Cologne.

In the time of Chaucer, it was uncommon to participate in any extensive forms of travelling. Thus, the fact the Wife of Bath has travelled so much delineates just how wealthy and worldly she is. 

Moreover, she is obviously the master over all that happens in her life. She is capable, not only in the managing of her money and her travels but also in regard to her love-life. As said before, she was married to five different men and actively chose a new husband after almost every one of them passed away. The narrator even goes so far as to call her "Gap-toothed." At the time, it was a physical trait people associated with promiscuity. And, at the end of her brief description in The Prologue, the narrator states:

The remedies of love she knew, perchance,
For of that art she’d learned the old, old dance.

The narrator is blatantly saying that the Wife of Bath knows quite a bit about love and its "old, old dance" (i.e. sex). 

Basically, The Prologue paints the Wife of Bath as an experienced, smart, capable, and sophisticated older woman who is unapologetically true to herself. 

As a woman who represents the antithesis of what is expected of the gender during the middle ages, we can begin by saying that the Wife of Bath is, first and foremost, a feminist renegade that truly believes in the rights of women to enjoy marriage for all its benefits: love, sex, money, and companionship.

She is also advantageous, witty, obviously seductive, sensually active, incredibly creative with her time, emotionally independent, fearless, and very outspoken. She takes it upon herself to advice other women on what is righteous and advantageous to them, and this is because she is one of the few daring woman to respect her gender as it should be respected by all.

How does Chaucer portray the Wife of Bath in the General Prologue?

One thing we know about the Wife of Bath from the General Prologue is that she's very much a woman ahead of her time. Married five times and actively on the lookout for husband number six, she's a liberated woman at a time when women were expected to be subordinate to their menfolk.

As well as sexual freedom, the Wife of Bath also enjoys financial freedom, which again would've been something very unusual for women in those days. The Wife's independent wealth allows her to travel to various holy sites of pilgrimage, such as the shrine to St. Thomas a Becket in Canterbury, which is where she and the other pilgrims of The Canterbury Tales are headed. In those days, travel involving all but the shortest distances was an expensive business. But as the Wife of Bath is comfortably off, this isn't a problem for her.

In the Prologue to her tale the Wife of Bath presents herself as an authority on marriage. A perfectly reasonable position, one might think, given that, as we've already seen, she's been married no fewer than five times. She notes that the traditional interpretation of the Bible is that women should not remarry on the death of their husbands. Yet she counters that somewhat sexist assumption by reminding her auditors that, in the Bible, God also instructed us to be fruitful and multiply, and that is precisely what the Wife of Bath has been doing her whole adult life.