Chaucers Canterbury Tales - The Miller’s Tale and the Life of Christ E

The Millers Tale and the Life of rescuer When Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, he created a great majority of the individual tales by borrowing and reworking material from various sources. Most of these stories would stir been very familiar to his mediaeval audience, and the changes he made in the standard version of these tales for his work would draw been a form of tacit communication that would score added an extra mark to each of them. Howard says that ... the tales possess a tingedness of their own within a solid ground of other texts. They can be understood only with reference to shared out formulas of language or generic traits... (448). In the Millers tale Chaucer parodies the Knights Tale, which itself was adapted from a longer tale ... from Italy ... from Boccaccio (Howard 448), by combining and satirizing highly irreverent references to the emotional state of Jesus Christ with the story of Oedipus to make the tale as dirty and comical as possible. The Mil lers tale introduces a carpenter, John, his wife, Alison, and a student lodger, Nicholas. The realization of John as a carpenter immediately causes the audience to relate these characters to another famous carpenter and his wife, namely, Joseph and Mary from the Bible. (quote) The character of John is uniform to Joseph not only because of their shared profession, but also because of the shared situations with their wives forrader marriage. Chaucer mentions how it was a rather rash move for John to marry Alison, a woman much younger than he. He says He might have known, were Cato on his shelf,/A man should marry someone like himself (89). plainly as Joseph was wary of marrying Mary because she was already pregnant such that he did not want to expose her to p... ...t flood, cuts loose the ropes holding his tub to the jacket and falls to the ground, breaking his arm in the process. The ridicule that John receives from the neighbors who have been told by Alison and Nicholas that h e is insane, serves to create enough of a triumph as to symbolize Christs resurrection. The triumph would not have been nearly as dramatic if it had merely consisted of Nicholass recovery or Absalons defeat because it would not have set up Nicholass main goal of killing his father and marrying his mother. Works CitedChaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. England Penguin Books, 1977.Howard, Donald R. Chaucer His Life, His Works, His World. youthful York E. P. Dutton, 1987. bracing International Version. Holy Bible. Michigan Zondervan Bible Publishers, 1988.Wilson, A. N. Jesus A Life. New York W. W. Norton & Company, 1992.