The Knight’s depiction of power politics in ancient Athens is thus reduced to a town/gown squabble in contemporary Oxford, a university town famous for such tensions. Their passion for Alison leads all three men to painful fates that the Miller clearly believes they deserve; his tale presents each as seduced not only by her but by an uncritically embraced literary genre. Gullible John’s acceptance of the depiction of Noah’s flood in medieval mystery plays allows Nicholas to convince him that a new flood is about to engulf the world, and that he must hang separate tubs inside the roof of his house for himself, Alison, and Nicholas, in which they will weather the storm. (Nicholas’ persuasive speech parodies Theseus’ more elevated but equally self-interested words to Palamon and Emily at the end of “The Knight’s Tale.”) Nicholas, in turn, is so enamored of the role of the tricky cleric who cuckolds unsuspecting husbands in dozens of medieval fabliaux that, after having sex with Alison in John’s bed while the carpenter snores in his tub—the Miller’s tart version of Theseus sitting on a high throne towering above his worshipful subjects—he can’t resist improving on his scheme by sticking his buttocks out the window for Absolon to kiss, only to have them badly burned when that worthy man, frustrated and furious over having been tricked into kissing Alison’s “naked ers” at the same window earlier that night, buggers Nicholas with a hot coulter (a phallus-shaped plow blade).

Absolon’s mistreatment by Alison results from his assumption that he could win her by reciting plaintive love lyrics outside her bedroom; his resulting indignation leads him to forswear such “paramours” and to undertake the red-hot vengeance that constitutes one of English literature’s great comic climaxes: When wounded Nicholas cries out for water, John awakes and, thinking that “Nowélis flood” (p. 202) has come, cuts loose his tub and falls to the ground, breaking his arm.

The epic struggle in “The Knight’s Tale” between ancient city-states degenerates in the Miller’s hands into Oxford intergroup antagonism and stereotyping. Early in the tale, Nicholas, promising Alison that he will find a way for them to have sex without John’s knowledge, declares scornfully, “A clerk had litherly biset his whyle, / But-if he coude a carpenter bigyle!” (p. 176). John returns the favor when he thinks Nicholas’ (phony) coma results from his prying into “goddes privetee” (p. 184), and berates scholars for lacking the good sense of working people like himself. At the end, when the wounded John tries to tell his neighbors the truth about his fall, he is successfully contradicted by all the students present, who stick together in unanimously pronouncing the carpenter mad.

As the Miller “quytes” the Knight, so “The Reeve’s Tale” enacts revenge for the latter’s perceived mistreatment in the Miller’s prologue and tale. A further coarsening of language results: When the Reeve is not showering words of sarcastic contempt on Simkin, the vicious, scoundrelly, and ridiculously proud miller of Trumpington, the latter is sassing his victims—Alien and John, two Cambridge students, further degraded versions of Palamon and Arcita, whom he has just cheated—by suggesting that since they must stay overnight in his narrow dwelling they should use the hocus-pocus of philosophy to make it bigger. Even Allen and John (yokels whose northern dialect Chaucer reproduces in the first known instance of English dialect comedy) respond to their misadventures by insulting each other, and when Allen decides to get even by raping the Miller’s daughter, he chides his companion as a “swynes-heed” and a “coward” (p. 226) for not joining in (John then rapes the wife). When language finally yields to violence—the students beat the Miller to a pulp and get their stolen flour back—the reader feels that the descent has not been very great.

The last part of The Canterbury Tales, Fragment I, is the ninety-eight-line snippet of “The Cook’s Tale,”* all that is extant and probably all Chaucer wrote. It’s preceded by a prologue featuring a brief, sharp dialogue between the Host and the Cook, natural rivals for Southwark customers, suggesting future (if not present) “quytyng,” but in the few lines of the tale that we have, its inhabitants (London low-lifes) meet to “hoppe and synge and maken swich disport” (“dance and sing and make sport”) rather than tell stories; the preferred form of intercourse (because of the money it can supply) is sexual rather than verbal or commercial: As the fragment ends we learn of a wife “that heeld for countenance / A shoppe, and swyved for hir sustenaunce” (“that kept, for countenance, / A shop, and whored to gain her sustenance”).

In another instance of “quytyng,” the Friar and the Summoner—two clerical con men who prey on their victims by means of opportunistic preaching and flattery (the Friar) or threats of punishment by ecclesiastical courts (the Summoner, or process server)—square off with the anger of competitors, not for a free dinner but for a free ride at the expense of the gullible or the vulnerable. The Friar, a university-trained intellectual, adapts to his purpose a widely diffused preacher’s parable about a notoriously predatory official (in this case a summoner, of course) who is carried off to hell by a devil because his victims really mean it when they wish him there for his crimes. To his appropriation of the medieval “theology of intention” the Friar adds a dialogue between the summoner and his diabolical companion that emphasizes the former’s prying nature (necessary for one who makes a living by blackmail as well as coercion) in the way he grills the devil about his life in Hell and his methods of trapping sinners. The Friar’s implication is clear: The summoner’s curiosity—his meddling in other people’s pryvetee—is setting him up for his final, infernal destination, where he will learn plenty about the wages of sin.

The Summoner’s reply counters the Friar’s theological language with a dose of the well-established anti-fraternal discourse that took shape in thirteenth-century Parisian university circles (where it was sponsored by opponents of mendicant scholars such as the Dominican Thomas Aquinas) and became popular among fourteenth-century critics of the increasingly worldly and prosperous fraternal orders, which originally intended to support themselves by begging. The outrageously greedy and hypocritical friar of “The Summoner’s Tale” suffers a double humiliation. First, Thomas, the sick householder from whom the friar relentlessly solicits a monetary offering, farts into the latter’s hand after inviting him to “grope” behind him for a gift that, however, the mendicant must share with the other eleven members of his convent. (“Grope” was a word widely applied to a priest’s quizzing of a penitent in confession—“groping” his conscience in order to discover all his sins—and friars were popular confessors because, according to their detractors, they assigned easy penances in return for gifts; hence Thomas’s use of the term has a satirical edge.) Thomas’s angry, flatulent riposte to his tormentor sets up the friar’s second comeuppance: the solution to the problem of how to divide a fart in twelve parts proposed by Jankin, a squire of the local lord to whom the friar goes to complain about his mistreatment. Jankin’s ingenious suggestion, involving a cartwheel along the spokes of which the fart’s sound and odor can be dispensed equally to the other members of the convent, with the friar himself occupying a privileged position at the hub of the wheel immediately below farting Thomas, has parodic overtones of Pentecost (when the gift of the Holy Spirit showed itself divided into tongues of flame over the head of each apostle), and thus makes a satiric comment on the pride taken by the mendicant orders as preachers of the Word, which, in their hypocritical mouths, becomes no better than a fart.

Several Canterbury Tales besides “The Knight’s Tale” explore the problem of making appropriate decisions in situations where there can be no certainty about the best choice. In such cases careful deliberation, based on the wisdom to be garnered from prior experience and trustworthy counselors, leads to prudent decision-making, while imprudent choices, driven by the passions of the moment and applauded by sycophantic subordinates, can issue in folly and disaster. The long prose “Tale of Melibee”* told by the pilgrimage narrator (hence some version of Chaucer) consists of an extended dialogue between Melibee, a mighty lord outraged by an assault on his home and intent on vengeance, and his wife, Prudence, who, true to her name, argues for patience, good counsel (especially hers), and full consideration of possible consequences before Melibee takes action.

More purely narrative than the “Melibee,”* but like it seriously concerned with the processes and outcomes of decision-making by those who possess domestic or political power (and in some cases those who do not), are the tales told by the Clerk (graduate student) of Oxford, the Merchant, and the Franklin. “The Clerk’s Tale” is the great enigma of The Canterbury Tales; its story of Griselda, the humble peasant girl chosen as wife by Walter, a rich marquis, who then brutally tests her obedience to him, even to the point of her acquiescing when she’s told of his apparent murder of their young children, was one of the most widely known stories of fourteenth-century Western Europe. Each version of the story differs in how it seeks to explain Walter’s behavior, his motivation for testing Griselda, and her choices in obeying him. The happy ending, in which Griselda is reunited with her children and her husband (who had also feigned divorcing her so he could marry someone of a more appropriate social rank), does nothing to efface the air of psychological mystery and extreme human imprudence that hangs over the story. In the end, the greatest mystery is whether Walter or Griselda has the greater power in their relationship—he by his ability to impose harsh trials on her, or she by her ability to endure the trials and to force him finally to suspend them.

“The Merchant’s Tale” is a quasi-allegorical fable about the high price of imprudence. Lecherous old January decides to marry beautiful young May, ignoring the reservations of his counselor, Justinus, in favor of the enthusiastic support given by his time-serving lackey, Placebo (literally, “I will please”). When January cannot satisfy May sexually, she decides to accept the importunate advances of his squire, Damyan.