Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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"The Miller's Tale" is a bawdy comic narrative (a fabliau) from Geoffrey Chaucer's *The Canterbury Tales*, written in Middle English verse in the late 14th century. It centers on a love triangle — and then a square — involving John, a jealous Oxford carpenter; his young wife Alisoun; Nicholas, a clever student lodging with them who successfully seduces her; and Absolon, a vain parish clerk who also pursues Alisoun with increasingly ridiculous courtly gestures. Nicholas engineers an elaborate hoax, convincing the credulous carpenter that a second Noah's Flood is coming, so he can sleep with Alisoun uninterrupted. The tale's climax delivers slapstick revenge on all parties through a mix of misdirected kisses, a branding iron, and a carpenter falling from his own rafters. As a fabliau, the tale gleefully inverts courtly love conventions — desire here is blunt, physical, and won through cunning rather than poetry — and satirizes the gullibility of jealous older husbands and the pretensions of both bookish scholars and would-be courtly lovers. Its notably earthy humor and frank sexuality made it controversial even among Chaucer's contemporaries, as the frame narrative itself acknowledges.

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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