Miller's Tale Research Articles

The Art of the Gawain-Poet by W. A. Davenport

REVIEWS Old French fabliaux, from essentially a generic point of view.One of the things we may learn from it is the difficulty of finding a single critical approach that will illuminate both a popular genre like the fabliaux and the transformations of that genre in the hands of a sophisticated artist. A few matters remain.Among the several misprints, the reading of "wel" for "wol" in a line from Chaucer on p.193 is especially unfor­ tunate, as is the misnumbered and marred passage from The Miller's Tale on p.180. There is a bibliography of works consulted and a thorough index.It is good to see footnotes rather than endnotes.Where passages of the French fabliaux are cited, Professor Cooke supplies appropriately idiomatic translations.He obviously enjoys the fabliaux and wants us to enjoy them, which is as it should be. GLENDING OLSON Cleveland State University W.A.DAVENPORT, The Art of the Gawain-Poet. London: The Athlone Press, 1978.Pp.xiii, 233.$18. It has become the custom of American scholarly reviewers to use their assignments as a means of composing their own articles, or of flailing their subject's work in order to establish their own reputations by demon­ strating keenness of vision ("Notable is the inexplicable misspelling of 'the' on p.26"), learned patronization ("What a pity the author did not see fit to include Prof.Hofstaur's 1904 article"), and mastery of the cheap shot ("Graduates of land-grant universities tend to think that ... "). Indeed the scholarly review has come to have a standard form: an open­ ing paragraph beginning "How wonderful that at last an examination of ...has been attempted"; a second paragraph beginning "What a pity then that ... "; an indeterminate number of paragraphs beginning with variants of "If that were not bad enough ... "; and a final paragraph beginning "It remains then.... " It is thus a pleasure to fly in the face of tradition in order to recom­ mend a volume of literary criticism with well-nigh whole-hearted en­ thusiasm, my only caveat being that the reader ignore the author's ill­ conceived critical method outlined in his introduction, militantly fol­ lowed through page 38 (halfway through the Pearl chapter), and then, 155 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER thank God, abandoned completely.For aside from this unfortunate be­ ginning, University of London Senior Lecturer W.A.Davenport's vol­ ume is the sanest, most perceptive, and best-written book-length study we have yet had on the Gawain-poet. The Introduction states that the author intends "to write about Pear l, Purity, Patience and Sir Gawain in terms of their effectiveness as poetry" and hence "to try to define the effects they have on the reader and the way the reader responds to them," a strategy which could possibly (given a certain type of reader) give high marks to "Casey at the Bat" and none at all to "Burnt Norton" (a forgiveable cheap shot).The first part of the Pearl chapter abounds in statements beginning "Only now does the poet encourage one to judge his words ...," "The reader responds to the sorrowful courage ...," "One's sense of unease, however...." and the like.Davenport is thus led into some notable confusions concerning the nature of late Middle-English literature, e. g. , "No medieval visionary wishing to communicate profound and rare religious experience would have chosen to be cryptic about it" and an apparent identification of debat and debate.This section also contains some really fearful analogies, e. g. , "the Dreamer is one in a long line from Odysseus to Henderson the Rain-King" and the statement that the Pearl child and her world "belong to the world of a romantic tale ..., the same world that contains the milk-white doe of Rylstone and the Woman in White. " But this is to pick minor flaws, gleaned from 38 pages out of 220, from a bad beginning to a fine book.After p.39 Davenport appears in his true colors; he is essentially a formalist, a New Critic who sees the poems as entities, and finally as a single entity, but a New Critic mercifully free from the jargon and posturing of the...

Chaucer's Pardoner and Preaching

The very quality of the Pardoner's confession and tale poses a major dilemma in coming to terms with Chaucer's characterization of the noble ecclesiaste. The Pardoner is perhaps the most accomplished storyteller on the Canterbury pilgrimage; and while his eloquence is finally Chaucer's, the mode of narration we encounter in the Pardoner's prologue and tale certainly differs from, for instance, the Miller's Tale where an ostensibly coarse and drunken narrator can tell a story with graceful ease and sober speed. The Pardoner's eloquence is an essential aspect of his character. In his prologue he insists no less than four times upon his skill as a preacher,' practically baits the pilgrims with his abilities as a storyteller,2 and then, in the brilliant sermon-tale which follows, delivers the advertised and pre-packaged goods. The juxtaposition of evil character and rhetorically effective exemplum dramatizes a separation between the speaker's word and deed; and this separation, which I take to be a basic fact in the characterization of the Pardoner, is emphasized by the Pardoner himself:

A Miller's Tale of True Grist

A Miller's Tale of True Grist

Comic Illusion and Dark Reality in "The Miller's Tale"

Comic Illusion and Dark Reality in "The Miller's Tale"

Chaucer's First Three Tales: Unity in Trinity

CHAUCER'S FIRST THREE TALES: UNITY IN TRINITY Garth A. McCann A critical truism for our time has been the conviction that "there are and have been many valid critical methods, each of which exhibits the literary object in a different light, and each of which has its characteristic powers and limitations."1 And as Chaucer's own characters—say, the Wife of Bathabundantly demonstrate, any text is open to any analysis. Chaucer's own works have been approached and interpreted, it seems to me, from two opposite but overly simplistic directions. The older and more traditional view approaches the first three of the Canterbury Tales as examples of established categorical types: the romance and the fabliau. The uncomfortable effect of this approach is that it makes the Miller's and the Reeve's tales seem far more alike than they, in terms of the thematic development of physical and psychological love, seem to warrant; also, it makes these tales seem almost completely unrelated to the tale of the Knight, except as unreconcilable and discordant opposites. A more recent and perhaps more scholarly view applies a single measure to all three tales and concludes that in terms of the love theme, the three are all alike: there is "no real difference between the love expressed by Palamon and Arcite on the one hand and that expressed by Nicolas and Absolon on the other." This approach reduces the amorous motif to mere "delight" and dismisses the tales as illustrations of the "effects of cupidinous love."2 Both of these approaches, though in some senses meritorious, exhibit the limitations of critical reductionism. And both leave unanswered the question: if Chaucer knew what he was doing, why did he use three tales? Had he intended only to establish a contrast to the romance, one fabliau would have been enough; had he sought only to illustrate cupiditas, a single tale would have s^ifficed. Why then, one wonders, should critics feel compelled to reduce the tales to a simplistic set of opposites or to throw them all together into the den of cupidity? If we leave these two critical alternatives behind and go on to consider the tales thematically, we discover among them a relationship of careful symmetry : they reveal a clear pattern in the way they handle the theme of love. This pattern can best be observed in the shifting dimensions of psychological and physical love: in the Knight's Tale we see love in terms of feeling, but not of fulfillment; in the Miller's Tale we see it in both emotion and action; and in the Reeve's Tale we see love devoid of mental attraction, but replete with physical satisfaction. Moving from a strongly psychological, through a 1R-S. Crane (ed.), Critics and Criticism (Abridged Edition, Chicago, 1957), iv. 2D-W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton, N. J., 1962), p. 469. 10 Chaucer's First Three Tales: Unity in TtorriY11 mixed, to a distinctíy physical emphasis, the three tales function as a trilogy on the theme of love. As Charles Muscatine argues, the stylistic pattern in the three tales passes from the elevated through the mixed to the naturalistic.3 As we have sketched out, the love theme follows a strikingly similar movement; thus the style and the theme articulate aclrnirably. Taken together in the three tales, they develop what we might call Chaucer's love sonata, played in three distinct yet related movements. The artistic unity which we find centers not so much on "character" as on motive, and the thematic relationship among the tales is not a polarity, but a trilogy.4 In the lengthy and leisurely movement of the Knight's Tale, the theme of love is never far from the center of interest. Although order may well be the central concern of Theseus,6 it is by no means the primary motive for the lovers' action and attitudes. Order is the form into which the action is cast by the intervention of Theseus, but love provides the motivation for the behavior of the two knights and, one might even say, for the plot of the tale. Palamon and Arcite, had they not been...

A Minor Analogue to the Branding in “The Miller's Tale”

A Minor Analogue to the Branding in “The Miller's Tale”

Imagery in the Knight's Tale and the Miller's Tale

Imagery in the Knight's Tale and the Miller's Tale

Poetic Justice in the Miller's Tale

Poetic Justice in the <i>Miller's Tale</i>

Three Notes on "The Miller's Tale"

Three Notes on "The Miller's Tale"

The inhibited and the uninhibited: Ironic structure in the ‘Miller's Tale’

The inhibited and the uninhibited: Ironic structure in the ‘Miller's Tale’

The Swallow in Chaucer's "Miller's Tale"

The Swallow in Chaucer's "Miller's Tale"

Chaucer's Use of the Mystery Plays in the Miller's Tale

Chaucer's Use of the Mystery Plays in the <i>Miller's Tale</i>

Chaucer's Miller's Tale, A 3483-6

Chaucer's Miller's Tale, A 3483-6

Structure and Intention in the First Fragment of the Canterbury Tales

Not the least attraction of Professor Wilson's recent interpretation of Chaucer's Knight's Tale appearing in these pages is his opening statement: “The Knight's Tale is a masterpiece.” Very few students of Chaucer would take exception to it, and furthermore it expresses admirably the attitude of scholars who have recently published studies of that tale. There has long been agreement that The Canterbury Tales is a masterpiece, and the General Prologue is likewise so regarded. But following it and the Knight's Tale without a break-in fact with the closest kind of linkage Chaucer used-are the Miller's Prologue and Tale, the Reeve's Prologue and Tale, the Cook's Prologue, and fifty-seven lines of the Cook's unfinished tale. This 4422-line group of tales and links (designated Fragment I by Professor Robinson whose text I am using) is more than a repository for one or two masterpieces: it is a masterpiece itself. As there is no need to press the claims of the General Prologue or the Knight's Tale, much of what follows will be a discussion of the other parts of Fragment I, though not with the purpose of declaring them individually masterpieces. The aim is to discover the artistic integrity of the group as a whole. Professor William Frost in another recent interpretation of the Knight's Tale' stops just short of a similar purpose. To support his interpretation he cites briefly several features of the Miller's Tale. The procedure here, however, will not be to argue for one or another interpretation of the Knight's Tale by reference to other tales but to discover how carefully Chaucer has interconnected all the parts of the group and to demonstrate if possible how in this group as in any work with a unified theme the whole transcends the sum of the parts.

The Miller's Tale: 3187-3215: Chaucer and the Seven Liberal Arts in Burlesque Vein

The Miller's Tale: 3187-3215: Chaucer and the Seven Liberal Arts in Burlesque Vein

A Chaucerian Hapax Legomenon: upon the viritoot

In Chaucer's Miller's Tale (A 3767 seq.) we find the following remark addressed by Gerveys the locksmith to Absolon, the amorous parish clerk:' What, Absolon, for Cristes sweete tree, Why rise ye so rathe? ey, benedicitee! What eyleth now? Som gay gerl, God it woot, Hath brought yow thus upon the viritoot. The italicized expression has long been problematic. Skeat (The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer 5.110) writes as follows:

`Pilates Voys'

Previous articleNext article No Access`Pilates Voys'Roscoe E. ParkerRoscoe E. Parker Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 25, Number 2Apr., 1950 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2848928 Citations: 4Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1950 The Mediaeval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Mia Mahmudur Rahim Meta-regulation Approach of Law: A Potential Legal Strategy to Develop Socially Responsible Business Self-regulation in Least Developed Common Law Countries, Common Law World Review (Feb 2012): 1–33.https://doi.org/10.1350/clwr.2011.40.1.0220Mia Mahmudur Rahim Meta-Regulation Approach of Law: A Potential Legal Strategy to Develop Socially Responsible Business Self-Regulation in Least Developed Common Law Countries, Common Law World Review 40, no.22 (Jun 2011): 174–206.https://doi.org/10.1350/clwr.2011.40.2.0220 Robert E. Lewis The English Fabliau Tradition and Chaucer's "Miller's Tale", Modern Philology 79, no.33 (Oct 2015): 241–255.https://doi.org/10.1086/391136 Leonard Ellinwood A Further Note on 'Pilates Voys', Speculum 26, no.33 (Oct 2015): 482–482.https://doi.org/10.2307/2850867

`Wirk Alle Thyng By Conseil'

In his note to the passage in the Miller's Tale (p. 789), Robinson follows Haeckel3 and others in referring the reader to the lines in the Bible which read (EcclesiasticUs xxxii, 24): 'Fili, sine consilio nihil facias, et post factumn non poenitebis.'4 Though no one will doubt that this is the ultimate source of the present proverb, there are two points worth noting in regard to it. First of all, the Bible quotation occurs in a negative sense, whereas Chaucer each time uses a positive meaning; secondly, Ecclesiasticus is attributed not to Solomon but to Jesus, son of Sirach. Is, then, the Bible itself the immediate source for Chaucer or for the originals which he used? If, as is generally assumed to be the case, the Tale of MIelibee is earlier than the tales by the Miller and the Merchant,5 there is a ready explanation for this attribution of the three extracts, in any event in the case of Melibee. In his Liber consolationis et consilii, Albertano of Brescia wrote: 'Dixit enim Salomon: Omnia

Solas in the Miller's Tale

Solas in the Miller's Tale

Solas in the Miller's Tale

Solas in the Miller's Tale