She then gives the clerk the key to her daughter's bin and invites him to have sex with her. Both students ride off and get a good laugh of their revenge with the beating of the cheating Miller and the double humiliation on his wife and daughter; despite their tearful farewells Aleyn has no thought of either Malyne or the child she will give birth to-which will ruin her parents plans to marry her off as a virgin bride. Others emphasize that Aleyn, by surprising Malyne and covering her mouth, prevents her from consenting, which makes the sex rape. The Chaucer Review Oswald, The Reeve, is an old man that is a carpenter by trade, and dislikes The Miller's Tale. Chaucer's influence on fifteenth-century Scottish literature, A Commentary on the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Reeve%27s_Tale&oldid=1017060832, Articles needing additional references from October 2016, All articles needing additional references, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 10 April 2021, at 15:36. A. W. Bennett In Chaucer at Oxford and Camb. No mill is even mentioned in the story. John and Aleyn hold an even larger amount of wheat than usual and say they will watch Symkyn while he grinds it into flour, pretending that they are interested in the process because they have limited knowledge about milling. Yet in … The third story told in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, Beidler, Peter G. "Chaucer's "Reeve's Tale", Boccaccio's "Decameron", IX, 6, and Two "Soft" German Analogues. She takes a club and hits her raging husband by mistake, thinking him one of the students. She mistakenly assumes that John's bed is her own. Pride in 'The Reeve's Tale' in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. The Press unites with alumni, friends, faculty, and staff to chronicle the University's life and history. any apes head was his skull" (Chaucer 80-81). Notes to the Prologue to the Reeves Tale. A reeve is a manager of someone's estate or farm. Satire is a biting literary tool, one that Geoffery Chaucer used liberally when he wrote his Canterbury Tales. Later, a cat wakes up the innkeeper's wife and she gets up to investigate. 3. Webster's New World Dictionary says that satire is "the use of ridicule, sarcasm, etc. Both tales deal with a seduction within the sanctity of the hearth (or household): In The Miller's Tale, only the young wife is seduced. In The Reeve's Tale, however, both the daughter and the wife are "swyved" (screwed) by the young students. Benson, Larry D. The fact that the Reeve’s Tale is framed as a-tale-for-a-tale exchange between the Miller and the Reeve (part of the broader game to pass the time that is the Canterbury Tales) mirrors how the economy of requital in the tale itself becomes inseparable from “play,” broadly defined and with all the potential for disorder that it implies. Thomas Garbaty ChauR 8 73 Satire & Regionalism: The Reeve & his Tale Betty Hill NM 74 73 Chaucer: The MillT & RvT G. Olson MLQ 35 74 RvT as a Fabliau J. The Reeve. (This may be a slang term for pregnancy, similar to the modern "bun in the oven", a further humiliation to the Miller.)[5]. Write the second section of your page here. His sword is rusty while he rides a fine gray horse called Scot. Returning to the miller's house, John and Aleyn offer to pay him for a night's sleeping there. Chaucer often appealed to stereotyped humor in his portraits. Explain how The Miller's Tale and The Reeve's Tale might be said to reveal a situation that medieval men really deplored and dreaded. In six pages this paper analyzes the ironic satire of Geoffrey Chaucer's 'The Reeve's Tale.' The reeve, named Oswald in the text, is the manager of a large estate who reaped incredible profits for his master and himself. The Reeve's tale tells of two young Cambridge students with marked provincial accents who set out to see that the arrogant and dishonest miller who grinds the college wheat does not cheat them. of Contents. "In Search of Malyne. The Miller’s Tale Quotes. She slips in beside him and both are surprised and have sex together. Hearing this, Symkyn rises from his bed in a rage, which wakes his wife in John's bed. drollery. Nicole Nolan Sidhu takes a different angle and argues that this scene stages tensions between Christian doctrine and social practices over women's free will in marriage. The Chaucer Review is published quarterly by the Pennsylvania State University Press. While they ground the corn in the mill, (ed.). With a personal account, you can read up to 100 articles each month for free. To access this article, please, Access everything in the JPASS collection, Download up to 10 article PDFs to save and keep, Download up to 120 article PDFs to save and keep. 1-2.) He challenges them to use their rhetorical training to make his single bedroom into a grand house. 3886 Oure olde lemes mowe wel been unweelde, Our old limbs may well be feeble, 3887 But wyl ne shal nat faillen, that is sooth. [4], As morning approaches, Aleyn and Malyne have an exchange of feelings which scholars have described as a mock aube or dawn-song, where two lovers express their sorrow at parting in the morning after a night together. Two Cambridge students, John and Aleyn, received permission from the master of the college to see the corn ground at the mill - and resolved not to let the dishonest miller cheat them out of even half a grain of corn. Fabliaux (plural) typically involve deception to acquire money or goods, to get sexual gratification, or to get revenge. "The Reeve's Tale" betrays a conservative bias against social mobility in the way it portrays the upper-class aspirations of Symkyn and his family members. Purchase this issue for $26.00 USD. The Canterbury Tales is a satire, which is a genre of literature that uses humor—sometimes gentle, sometimes vicious—to ridicule foolish or corrupt people or parts of society. As the leading journal of Chaucerian literary criticism, The Chaucer Review acts as a forum for the presentation of research on and concepts about Chaucer and the literature of the Middle Ages. Start studying Canterbury Tales Characters Description, Irony, Satire, Praise. The northeastern accent of the two clerks is also the earliest surviving attempt in English to record a dialect from an area other than that of the main writer. "The Reeve's Tale" is one of eight of Chaucer's stories adapted by Pasolini in The Canterbury Tales. Select a purchase Access supplemental materials and multimedia. Active Themes. Evidence for this reading includes the fact that she calls him her "lemman" after the fact and tells where the cake made out of his stolen flour is hidden. Some argue that, although she is surprised at the beginning, by the end of the night she seems to be in love with Aleyn. Chew on This. (T.W. Lesson of Tale: The Miller gives no specific moral, though the general impression of his satire is that the Knight's view of sexual attraction and courtship is unrealistic. The Reeve's Tale 1. The Reeves tale is a satire of the Miller's tale, that is less 1 Description 2 Status/Class 3 4 Section heading Write the first section of your page here. Check out using a credit card or bank account with. They come back and end up spending a night with the family, and find that the miller's daughter spends every night locked in a bin to protect her chastity. However, definitions for "wench" in the Middle English Dictionary primarily suggest a woman's youth and lower class status (although they secondarily can also suggest sexual servitude). Oswald responds with a tale that mocks the Miller's profession. This type of love poem was usually written in a very high, courtly style and the characters in them were usually knights and ladies, but in this tale Chaucer brings it down to the level of a fabliau, which gives it a strong satire. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools. Demonstrates through contemporary demographics and dialects that Chaucer's dialectical play in Reeve's Tale is a double-layered joke: the Reeve mimics "a provincial dialect in his own barbarous jargon." rotten. Founded in 1966, The Chaucer Review: A Journal of Medieval Studies and Literary Criticism publishes studies of the language, sources, historical and political contexts, social milieus, and aesthetics of Chaucer's poetry, as well as associated studies on medieval literature, philosophy, theology, and mythography relevant to an understanding of the poet, his contemporaries, his predecessors, and his audiences. Evidence for this reading includes the fact that she calls him her "lemman" after the fact and tells where the cake made out of his stolen flour is hidden. The story is a direct response to "The Miller's Tale" which precedes it. Although some scholars are reluctant to say that Chaucer ever read The Decameron, Chaucer's story is very close to one told in Day IX, Tale 6 of that set of Italian tales, in which two clerks lodge with an innkeeper for the night. JSTOR is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization helping the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways. SATIRE AND REGIONALISM: THE REEVE AND HIS TALE by Thomas Jay Garbdty Chaucer's humor is based on both external and internal grounds, his torical research being used to elucidate the first, literary criticism the second. The miller later finds out and accuses his wife, only to have her reveal that he is a robber. Reeve's Tale fuses all three in a complex plot (for a fabliau) based on the type known as the "cradle trick." All Rights Reserved. The Reeve goes on to say that the story demonstrates the proverb "Hym thar nat wene wil that yvele dooth" and concludes "A gylour shal hymself bigyled be" (lines 4320–22). option. "With blearing of a proude miller's eye": dimming his eye; playing off a joke on him. Other "cradle-trick" tales include the French De Gombert et des deux clers, a Flemish tale: Ein bispel van ij clerken, and two German tales: Das Studentenabenteuer and Irregang und Girregar.[1]. JSTOR®, the JSTOR logo, JPASS®, Artstor®, Reveal Digital™ and ITHAKA® are registered trademarks of ITHAKA. Compare Tolkien (entry 399). After he returns to his bed, the innkeeper's wife returns and feels her way to the bed with the cradle in front of it, which is actually the clerk's bed. added), and Malyne, between emotional words of parting, tells Aleyn about a bread in the mill—an odd fixture in any love poem. The story's narrator is a reeve1 who used to be a carpenter. Also his Tale, unique in using dialect humor, is doubly funny because the Reeve's own vernacular was at this time no longer understood in London. There is ongoing debate about the nature of the sex that Malyne has with Aleyn. These tales were popular all over Europe in the Middle Ages. Read your article online and download the PDF from your email or your account. "The Reeve's Tale" – a plain-English retelling for non-scholars. Genre: A fabliau, a short, salacious tale about bourgeois (town-dwelling) non-aristocratic characters. [2] In this tale, the clerks do not know the miller, but are new in town looking for jobs as bakers. During the night, the miller's wife has sex with one of the clerks in exchange for a ring which will restore her virginity. He unties their horse, and the two students are unable to catch it until nightfall. [3] Malyne's parallel in the Decameron also finds the night enjoyable after some initial fear and is eager for future meetings with the clerk. 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