1. Chaucer
The Miller’s Tale

2. The Miller’s Tale
Genre: A fabliau (pl., "fabliaux"), a French invention that depicts bourgeois characters in satirical or openly comic plots involving unlikely and complex deceptions, usually concerning sex and/or money.
Ordinary everyday, characters, commoners, peasants, clerks, laborers, rather than aristocrats.
Stories involve sex, food, and money, defecation, farting, not idealized love.

3. The Miller’s Tale
About people in absurd and amusing circumstances, often naughty sexual predicaments.
Characters are often "tricksters“.
Stories frequently involve a betrayed husband (the cuckold), his unfaithful wife, and a cleric who is the wife's lover. Parody of the courtly lover.

4. The Miller’s Tale Characters: Nicholas, a clerk or student at Oxford.
John, a carpenter, rents rooms to the clerk, dresses his young wife in expensive clothing.
Alison, the carpenter’s much younger wife.
Absalom, a clerk, who now serves the priest in the cathedral, more interested in dressing well and pursuing the ladies of the town.

5. The Miller’s Tale The Miller’s Prologue Miller is drunk.
He’ll pay off the Knight’s tale.
“told his tale like any low-born clown”
Narrator apologizes. (60-75)
Nicholas – student. Versed in love, could tell the weather.
John –carpenter. Jealous.
Cuckoldry.

6. The Miller’s Tale Description of Alison. (45-84)
Nicholas makes a pass at Alison. (85-95). Compare to the behavior of a knight.
Is she willing, or not?
She’ll do it, if he can keep it a secret.
Absalom – parish clerk.
Knows how to bleed, trim hair, shave, write a deed, dance, sing.

7. The Miller’s Tale Wants to make out with Alison. Sings by her window.
Alison wants Nicholas to make a fool of her husband. Why?
What is the trick he plays on John?
John can’t sin with his wife before the flood comes.
Why does John believe Nicholas’s predictions?
Nicholas and Alison slip out and go to bed.
Absalom decides to visit Alison that night.

8. The Miller’s Tale Absalom asks for a kiss. A kiss on the ass.
Absalom pays back.
John makes a fool of himself.