Zimmermann

EN 2322

Chaucer, “The Miller’s tale,” “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” and Love

Fabliau: A humorous story popular in Medieval France. These stories often bawdy dealt familiarly with the clergy, ridiculed womanhood, and were pitched in a key that was easily recognizable to anybody. Although fabliaux may have ostensible “morals,” they they lacked the serious intention of the fable, and they differ from the fable too in always having human characters and maintaining a realistic tone and manner (Harmon and Holman).

Medieval Romance: A tale of adventure in which knights, kings, or distressed ladies, motivated by love, religious faith, or the mere desire for adventure, are the chief figures. The medieval romance appears in Old French literature of the twelfth century […]. The epic reflects an heroic age, whereas the romance reflects a chivalric; the epic has weight and solidity, whereas the romance exhibits mystery and fantasy; the tragic seriousness or the epic is not matched in the lighter-hearted romance; the epic observes narrative unity, whereas the structure of the romance is loose; love, usually absent or of minor interest in the epic, is supreme in the romance; the epic uses dramatic method of having the characters speak for themselves, whereas the reader of the a romance remains conscious of a narrator (Harmon).

Assignment

1. Outline “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.”
2. Include pages for main events.
3. Find events, characters, motifs in “Sir Lanfal” and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that reappear in the “The Wife’s Tale.”
• Note at least five similarities.
4. After you have outlined the tale, go back and find evidence for three Andreas Capellanus’s rules of Courtly Love.
• Copy the number and rule for each.
5. Find three characteristics of a medieval romance in the tale.