Ruin the sacred truths; Meddling with the Word in Chaucer's Miller's Tale.

Marianne Børch.

Thesis:

In a fabliau centring upon the manipulation of the holy Word, Chaucer invokes miracle plays. On a basis very different from his own, these plays meddle with the sacred text, and their presence implicitly helps Chaucer clarify his own problems with such meddling. Invoking miracle plays, however, Chaucer also indirectly comments upon these, perhaps even in a way which predicts their eventual demise.

While manipulating the Word is problematised, still it is a "goliardeys" narrator speaking with "Pilates voys",(1) who is made to speak Chaucer's most aesthetically polished piece of art. And churlish as this low-life, high-art narrator and his practice are, the Miller, unlike Pilate, is heard, not suppressed. While Chaucer implicitly dismisses the epistemology of mystery plays and the habits of oral composition, he also suggests that he takes over their practice and cultural role.

Chaucer is proud of his English tongue: he prefers it above choices perhaps more natural for a writer of his position and ambition.(2) At the same time, however, he is highly criticial of English "making": although arguably satire compliments its target, and may even be a symptom of Bloomesque anxiety of influence, still Chaucer does satirically expose the ineptness of the makers of popular romance in Sir Thopas, and dismisses a specifically English mode of composition such as the alitterative mode by simply not using it, or using it only locally (Knight's Tale, battle scene), or dismissing it (although in the displaced voice of the Parson rejecting "'rum-ram-ruf' by lettre", PsProl, 43); in HF, English minstrels are found in the company of sorcerers and deceivers, and knock in vain upon Fame's door. The other side of such criticism is Chaucer's way of rendering English "salonfähig" and intellectually mature, for this goes through voracious magpying expeditions into French, Latin, and Italian texts, and the adoption of foreign linguistic codes, rhetorical habits, and genres. So, the "father of English poetry" defines his position as much in opposition to, as in his enthusiasm for, English traditions.

The Chaucerian world of reference is also, as it were, international and clerical. For instance - and let that reference work metonymically for a host of others - we hear a lot about pagan Classical rites, but nothing of corn dollies and morris dancing. As for the miracle play, a meeting-place for English and pan-Christian traditions, and for oral and written practices, one might expect this to interest a poet fascinated by overlapping traditions. And a number of references show that he is, indeed, interested.

First, miracles are mentioned in passing by the Wife of Bath, who loves to make

... visitaciouns

To vigilies and to processiouns,

To prechyng eek, and to thise pilgrimages,

To playes of myracles, and to mariages ... WPProl, 555-8

The reference itself is significant in recording the phenomenon, but gives no detail.(3)

A cluster of references in MillT and Prol is more helpful. The hero of MillT, the trickster Nicolas cheats old John into sitting in a tub under the ceiling of his barn, having, he says, received visionary insight into "Goddes pryvetee": Nicolas, John, and John's wife Alison are the saving remnant chosen to survive an imminent Second Flood. The plot is known from fabliau analogues, but Chaucer specifically calls in from the miracle play the detail that will separate husband from wife: the shrewishness of Noah's wife.

"Hastow nat herd," quod Nicolas, "also

The sorwe of Noe with his felaweshipe,

Er that he myghte gete his wyf to shipe?

Hym hadde be levere, I dar wel undertake

At thilke tyme, than alle his wetheres blake

That she had had a ship hirself allone ..." 3538-43

Equally important - though not for my present purpose, so I merely mention it here, is a series of echoes of the miracle tradition in the portrait of Nicolas's rival, Absolon, which includes a direct reference to his playing "Herodes upon a scaffold hye" (3384). The final direct reference occurs outside of the tale in MillProl, where Miller - significantly, as I hope to show - speaks with "Pilates voys" (3124).

The presence, indeed structural significance, of these details in MillT, argue widespead familiarity with the phenomenon among Chaucer's audience, even as it shows that certain elements in the plays, only recorded long after Chaucer, were already there - such as the shrewishness of Noah's wife.(4) Still, Chaucer surely did not incorporate the miracle play to help modern scholars document its existence, but for other reasons, which this paper will seek to identify and explore.

One reason is obvious: miracle plays are invoked to authenticate the scene of the Miller's plot. Fabliaux, while far from realistic, do evoke contemporary, local, often named communities, and Chaucer takes care to make his a very English, and specifically Oxonian, one,(5) and one where clerks could read, but carpenters most likely not: here, the mystery play cycles would be among the reference points available to the tale's gull, Old John, an illiterate carpenter, for whom learning and reading evokes some barely Christian associations of arcane, uncanny insights, while his own access to texts clearly goes through oral transmission: his wisdom is embedded in proverbs, superstitious gossip, and garbled, book-derived lore, and his understanding of eschatological issues mediated by reference to mystery cycle accounts: John barely remembers them, but he recognises the phenomenon Nicolas refers to.

Chaucer's references serve not only authentification, but also point to a theoretical concern - namely with the typological reading which informs the mystery play. The MillT invites typological reading to the point of parody and critique, as it stages randy Alison as Noah's wife and the virgin Mary; makes John, the carpenter who has marital problems, typologically equal to Noah and Joseph; and presents Nicolas as both OT and NT God, annunciating Archangel, and Christ. Apart from comically overdetermined readings at the narratorial level, we find Nicolas in the plot performing a feat of typological abuse, as in heralding the Second Flood, he inscribes his private erotic purpose in the typological chain. According to the critic Sandra Prior, Chaucer, rigging the text so as to set typological expectations into play, shows concern with the dangers of playing God, dangers of which also writers of miracle plays, and critics of the plays, were conscious.(6) Chaucer arguably warns artists not to squeeze the typological lemon to hard, or they may well, like Nicolas, be "scalded in the towte" - a scalding anticipating eternal scalding in Hell.

In passing I should like to add a point in support of Prior's analysis of typological abuse. Throughout, the MillT places typological reading in a context of a preoccupation among the tale's less intelligent characters with omens and premonitions, whereas Nicolas's superiority rests upon his absolute lack of respect for such signs. In the end, the authority of an itching mouth is equated with that of the visionary prediction of typologically significant events (and they do, in fact, turn out to be equally reliable, as well as equally enigmatic). To read surfaces typologically is exposed, then, as naive, indistinguishable from primitive superstition, and impossible to reference or monitor as true or false.

But if typology is critiqued, it does offer a solution to a problem that continually nags Chaucer, namely that of representing the world of appearances in a way compatible with piety, i.e. in words that do not violate their obligation with regard to the Word. The site for studying this Chaucerian problem is, indeed, MillProl, and I find the collocation of miracle plays, typological critique, and lengthy poetic apology sufficiently striking to wish to pursue the subject of typology a little further, especially for its handling of the literal sense.(7) I shall argue in the following (essentially an exercise in comparative poetics), that the manipulations of the literal in Chaucer and miracle plays, although to some extent formally similar, are traceable to different epistemologies which generate radically different attitudes to, and so ways of legitimising, the literal sense of the text. I shall further place Chaucer's discussion in the context of the poet's position as a privileged observer of late-medieval English culture: Chaucer's poetry repeatedly confronts the epistemological turmoil of his age (realist-nominalist debate), and ponders the implications of the change from oral to written composition; his position, and the way he tends to develop his own solutions by playing to and against established genres and modes of discourse, make his texts a kind of barometer of cultural change,(8) and it is, indeed, possible from the encounter (or clash) between epistemologies in MillT and Prol to predict the future of the different kinds of text they generate.

Students of medieval sign theory tell us that the Bible was the ultimate reference point for stabilising signification.(9) It seems obvious, therefore, that any meddling with the Word, the way Nicolas, and by implication, mystery plays, manipulate the story of the Flood, would be suspect, even blasphemous; the joke in MillT certainly presupposes that an audience would recognise Nicolas's ploy as illegimate. But exactly how problematic is the practice of changing the text, and why, and in what way? Medieval practices can be very relaxed about textual variation, even in rendering the word of God.

Oral transmission and oral composition, for instance, are inseparable from verbal variation, though form and formula may be very tenacious. In the case of the Bible, there could be no stable vernacular text to read for the Miller's Old John, even if he could read. People might have access to biblical stories through pictorial representation, as in the Funen churches' fresco representation of famous scenes, but even "visibile parlare" (10) cannot be verbatim. People would hear clerical story-telling, too. Such stories told and glossed out of the Latin would already be, if not unstable, then at least mediated by the expounding preacher's variable choice of words. In miracle plays, what might loosely be called glossing is not separate from telling the story, and the holy stories would be not only dramatised, but also adapted to fit the typological scheme that determined their selection in the first place, and expanded with doctrinally and pedagogically relevent material. Everywhere in oral or semi-oral contexts, we find highly elastic texts. (11)

Not only was there no stable and normative Bible text available for most people, and endless variation in the way Biblical stories reached them, but there was ample, though implicit, theological justification in the typoogical approach for textual variation and expansion. "The purpose of [the mystery plays' typological] exegesis was to clarify the unity of salvation history, to show how the Old Testament looked forward to the New, how the New fulfilled the Old, and how and why biblical events continued to be relevant in the life of a contemporary Christian." (12) The typological pretext of God's purpose once acknowledged, and its manifestation highlighted by selection and emphasis, texts might allow, perhaps even encourage, a considerable measure of freedom at the literal level. Elements from the contemporary scene would be drawn into the text as part of the scheme - hence the "anachronisms" and topical references of the plays. The Second Shepherds' Play has fictitious medieval English shepherds walk into the Christ child's stable at the end, because they have made Christmas happen in their life; acting in a manner structurally analogous with the first shepherds, they can move into a time where past and present are subsumed in God's eternal present, and a space where Jerusalem and England are contiguous in the scheme of divine omnipresence. The particular and the typical, the culturally specific and the universal-eternal, thus exist in perfect harmony.

But what precisely is the status of the literal here? The "letter" of the text is clearly important as "the things that are seen" available for exciting representation and pious exploration; still, its principal importance lies in its structural relation to other incidents and to the complete divine plan, whereas difference, or historical peculiarity, is of secondary importance - a revelation, it is true, but also a veiling of the true form of the event. But if the specific-local is in a sense insignificant - God's truth remaining untouched by and harmonises different surfaces, this very insignificance is the key to considerable freedom: the text allows not only extensions of the typological scheme, but can accommodate jokes, parody, and fiction (e.g. stage a sheep as Christ, or make a thief and shepherds enact the story of divine grace), and fill in shadowy Biblical presences such as Noah's wife.

Chaucer, whose story-telling seems difficult to reconcile with piety, had to be fascinated with the nexus between freedom at the literal level and stability at the spiritual offered by typology as a system, and by glossing more generally. He knows about, and occasionally uses, "harmonising" readings: In the prologue to the tale of Melibee, his own persona holds verbal variation compatible with unity of purpose, and invokes in his support the single "sentence" of the four differently worded gospels. Still, Chaucer almost always centres upon the problems involved in such readings: he repeatedly demonstrates their abuse; and, even more importantly, he shows that the literal level of a text has its own intransigent way.

Chaucer delights in exposing the abuse of glossing and typological practices. Abuse occurs when authority is transferred from God's pre-text to a pretext of very different kind; in his texts, speakers from friars to chickens gloss in perverted fashion to gain riches, status, and erotic control. The danger of abuse is nowhere clearer than in Nicolas's plot in MillT - where Nicolas predicts a typologically significant event, but harnesses his inquiry into "Goddes pryvetee" in the service of mankind to the service of his inquiry into a wife's "pryvetee" to serve his own "pryvetee". Nicolas, then, privatises meaning. In the process, he suppresses the Bible's version of the story - which inconveniently promises no second Flood - and further peppers his version with a loan from the miracle play - thus doubly violating (rewriting) the Text that stands as pretext for typological readings, and reducing the Gospel to just one among many text to be juggled with.

But in the bigger scheme of things abuse is trivial: the real problem with Nicolas is a genuine affinity between his activity and an "art poetical", or texts which refuse to "obey" pretexts, and, indeed, subordinate pretexts of any kind.(13) Nicolas's portrait throughout is that of the artist, (14) and he is linked to the Miller and Chaucer through multiple cross-references and echoes. (15) This means that Nicolas cannot be dismissed as just another fabliau trickster, whose invasions into sacred places are generically contained. Nicolas may invade the realm of the sacred, but he also inhabits Chaucer's world, a world where the realm of the sacred is beginning to shrink away from people. Things are increasingly felt to be opaque, and words to be cut off from the stabilising norm of the Word. As hermeneutical controls dependent on a dying epistemology fail, the meaning of appearances and the textual letter come to be transferred from God-given pretext to elements in the text itself - and these in turn to be seen as dependent upon human intentionality. With that change, the status of the typological sign changes.

MillT shows the sacred text in that hands of an artist: Nicolas empties sacred concepts, methods, and texts of their original value and refills them with value defined by local, private criteria. His favourite device for this old-bottles-new-wine activity is the pun. Formally, the pun has much in common with the typological element. Indeed, a typological signifier is a pun that analogously implies other parts of the scheme. Thus in SecNT, Chaucer's Cecilie is a text which at the literal-historical level signifies a historical person, at the cosmic level the Empyrean, at the moral level the swiftness of good works, and so on. The letter of Cecilie thus "punningly" validates, manifests, and invokes the entire divine scheme (85-119). Similarly, Abraham in a miracle play is a pun on God, even as he recalls Samson, Jonah, etc. (16) We see here an incredible confidence in the literal, yet also a rigid pre-textual framework for reading it.

For Nicolas, however, puns depend upon arbitrary, intelligent exploitation of structural similarity to create privately useful meanings. Thus he employs the "wrong" flood account that will make mankind's insight into God's "pryvetee" into his own knowledge of Alison's "pryvetee". This is undoubtedly the most significant pun of the story, as indicated by its importance for the plot, its momentous epistemological implications, and its anticipation in MillProl; still, it is just one of many (incredibly bawdy) punning rewritings of sacred concepts, all serving Nicolas's private (erotic-aesthetic) purpose as they turn ontological analogy into "literary" symbol. There is, for instance, Nicolas promising that mankind shall not "be lorn" (3536) through proper action, yet that promise is his pretext for avoiding the disgrace of his having "to spille" (3278) - not only in sense of being lost, but of wasting his precious seed without the appropriate receptacle to spill it in. The salvation through "Goddes grace" (3595) depends upon Alison's "mercy" (3288). Making music in God's praise is clearly for Nicolas the adrenaline-pumping equivalent to anticipated typological fulfilment of "revel and ... melodye" (3652) in Alison's bed. Such puns on religious concepts occur among a wealth of other puns, as when Nicolas and Alison cherish the pun on "beard" (3742) - as something 1. perpetrated against, 2. kissed by Absolon, or when the word "water" (3815) triggers the double action of John cutting the rope that suspends his tub and Nicolas acting to soothe his pain.

Nicolas operates mainly at the level of the pun, making them "literary symbols" instead of ontological analogues by divesting signs of pretext authority, and filling them with private meaning. It is this ("nominalist") practice that makes Nicolas the abuser different from Chaucer the poet in degree only, not in kind.

Chaucer's practice resembles Nicolas's: he constantly tears the Word - e.g. the Song of Songs - from its theological pretext to let immediate context (at the literal level) control its meaning. But if the word has become free of God's word, is that a good thing? Chaucer, ventriloquising the Merchant's January, and calling the Song of Songs in the mouth of that old lecher "olde, lewed wordes", identifies the perversion of the liberated Word. A perversion for which the speaker/poet alone is responsible. Glossed by pretext, any text can "mean well"; (17) the Chaucerian artist, however, cannot say "I mean well" and rely on God's text to shine through his folly and incompetence (although this is precisely what Chaucer tries to do in his Retraction). Chaucer's texts mean what they say.

Where typology assumes that truth will remain be intact beneath different appearances, Chaucer's approach sees form and content as inseparable: any change in the letter affects the spirit, and so to rewrite Genesis is to subvert the very basis of the Christian creed. Later, Andrew Marvell was to say about Milton's Paradise Lost that he feared Milton's text would "ruin the sacred truths" of Genesis; much later Eco's Name of the Rose turns on the subversive effect of Christ's relativising smile, even as Antonia Byatt in Possession has her nineteenth-century protagonist, the poet Ash, wonder if you can convey a Christian ethos through Old Norse mythology. The question is always: Can you separate myth and message? The same anxiety shines through Chaucer's MillT: rewriting the sacred truths, punning on mercy and grace, and parodying God - all this is problematic for him as it is not in the miracle play, where the thief and the shepherds are "tamed" through typology. It is precisely Chaucer's faith in the cohesion and self-generating meaning of the literal that makes him anxious: he knows that if you change the story, you change its meaning.

The view that you will contest the one truth by multiplying variant versions is, of course, especially problematic in a literate culture. In a mainly oral society, the Bible's authority could be iconic as much as textual: The Bible is the text that is also a Book - the (good) Book; the object itself guarantees authority and metonymically represents the stabilising norm. With writing gaining ground, the existence of multiple texts, even of variant or disrespectful parodic versions of Biblical lore in stable, written form, occasionally in manuscripts so costly as to iconically signal authority, the Bible as icon and text is threatened; it is natural to encounter anxiety in a secular poet who thinks of himself as a writer, and a writer of texts that he hopes will be fairly stable, texts authorised by being written down, perhaps in just as awe-inspiring manuscripts as those of the sacred text. (18)

I suggested that in the problematised encounter between methodologies in MillT, one might discover some long-term perspectives. One is that individual making will no doubt remain suspect: at the same time, however, the emancipation of form provides not only specificity, but also protection. Textual form both guarantees value, and guarantees that such value is different from, and so does not contest, the Bible's. Through form (and perhaps through explicit statement), the text declares: "this is not the truth", but the "art poetical", game, not earnest. This carves out for poetry a niche that insures its long-term survival.

Simultaneously, the loss of hernemeutical controls, the proliferation of written, problematical texts, and the increased respect for the literal sense all make it necessary to have one true, authoritative biblical text, the true story. (19) With faith in the old epistemology waning, discourse which relies upon it - that of Mystery Plays (and saint's lives), which claim to live in the ambience of the true, must eventually become suspect; freedoms taken with the Word become not only contingent or even laudable (typologically up-dating God's narrative), but rather obfuscate the truth. Noah's wife and Mak the shepherd have to go.

Such perspectives, in fact, suggest a prophetic note in Chaucer's speculations about ruining the sacred truth. I have always understood that the Miracles were suppressed because they were so terribly Catholic - that is at least the received wisdom. (20) But isn't it possible that Protestants were happy to suppress the miracle play because in its accommodating attitude to the literal, the plays were in fact dangerous according the the Protestants' own lights - epistemologically suspect (purporting to be true) and suspect as textually mercurial?

Summing up: it is not only abuse of the literal that worries Chaucer, and makes miracles as his sparring partner in MillT and Prol, but a complex concern with the nature and validity of the literal, which is natural in a time of epistemological turmoil, and a time of transition from an oral to a written culture; not least for a poet who could feel himself moving away from the old epistemology, but was anxious about embracing the new.

It is interesting that Chaucer, so much the new man, father of the tradition of the discourse of the future, the "art poetical", and suspicious of English oral tradition, gives his discussion of art's legitimacy to the Miller and places his narrator in the undignified Miller's company in the General Prologue. (21) The Miller is a "janglere and a goliardeys" (560) and his portrait smells strongly of hellfire. In his Prol, the Miller is identified as a churl, and his behaviour confirms that. But churlish as he is, he is powerful: He does lead the company of pilgrims out of town. He does tell a story that - true to its protagonist Nicolas's practice - shapes and subordinates pretexts of every kind. (22) He does get to speak out of order. He is heard, then, heard precisely because he is loud, disrespectful, and disorderly, and heard with momentous results: a drunken churl's tantrum is enough to topple the God-given, analogy-based hierarchy and establish in its place a world of social contracts controlled by the will of its most intransigent, low-life member; moreover, his churlish tale casts long shadows on tales around it, notably the hierarchy-conscious KnT, and even offers an implicit showdown with a whole series of analogy, or typology-generated, discourse types. Thus Chaucer critiques oral composition and rejects the epistemology of the miracle play. Yet, in his displaced self-portrait of the artist as a churl, who tells a story of the artist as a young man, the poet shows himself taking over from the "goliardeys," and that in a world where Pilate's voice is not suppressed, as it has to be in a miracle play. Pilate's voice is heard.

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Appendix note: The new epistemology changes meaning of text, which becomes contingent not only upon speaker, but also upon audience.

If the writer becomes free with respect to pretext, he nevertheless becomes dependent upon context. Meanings are not immanent and given, but generated, dependent upon sender and receiver. MillT and its Prologue both dramatise this socially generated, and highly vulnerable, meaning: (For Prologue, where Miller establishes a social contract with some difficulty, see above text.( For the tale: Nicolas's plot works with Old John, but when he needs it, Nicolas moves out of this conspiracy to form a new with the outside community. The move isolates John, who is consequently declared "mad". (23) Thus, truth here depends on consent of the community - a matter not of the actual state of things, but of a social contract offered and accepted. Even as madness becomes defined not as the consequence of having looked too closely into "Goddes privitee," as earlier threatened by Nicolas, but as a social construction. Thus loss of pretext is the other side of the democratisation (in no way reassuring) of meaning.

shouting down the company with "Pilates voys". And The interesting thing is, however, that the Miller is heard: his Pilate's voice is not suppressed, as it has to be in a miracle play.

1) Quotations from Baugh, ed, Chaucer's Major Poetry.

2) His nationalist stirrings grow from his feeling for the language - as when the English king is "lord of our langage" (Astrolabe); a similar bond between nationalist and linguistic consciousness evident in Deschamps' eulogy to Chaucer as the "Grant Translateur".

3) Melvym Storm argues, in "Uxor and Alison: Noah's Wife in the Flood Plays and Chaucer's Wife of Bath," MLQ 48 (1987), 303-19, that Wife's portrait has deep affinities with the miracle play tradition.

4) For the references' value as documentation, see Alexandra F. Johnston, "Chaucer's records of early English drama," Records of Early English Drama Newsletter, 13.2 (1988), 13-20.

5) For Oxonian reference, see J.A.W. Bennet, Chaucer at Oxford and Cambridge (Oxford, 1974), chs. 1-2. Interesting that Chaucer developed these references in framebreaks, suggesting affinities between Clerk of Oxenford and tale's clerk, and between Alison, John's wife and Alison of Bath.

6) Sandra Pierson Prior, "Parodying typology in the Miller's Tale," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 16 (1986), 57-73. See also Alexandra Johnston's "Chaucer's records ...", n. 4.

7) Reference to Pilate's voice shows that miracles were in Chaucer's mind when he composed MillProl, and tale's interest in typology is anticipated in the Miller's punning joke about the two things a man should not look too deeply into - "Goddes pryvetee" and a wife's.

8) Thus, in SecNT, Chaucer's "sparring partner" is the Saint's Life; in TC, the discourse of Fyn Amour; in Sir Thopas, the popular romance; etc.

9) See, for instance, Jesse Gellrich, The idea of the Book in the Middle Ages: Language Theory, Mythology, and Fiction, Ithaca & London. Cornell UP, 1985.

10) Dante, Purgatorio, X.

11) Performance and its context would render the text even more mercurial.

12) Prior, pp. 58-9.

13) Nicolas, in fact, not only changes the Flood story; his privatisation of shared, public codes and vocabularies extends to rewriting the meaning of "fyn amour" and the reversal of social/marital hierarchies.

14) I am preparing an article on this at the moment. Nicolas - as close as you can get to a medieval art-for-art's-sake sensuous aestheticist - is a manipulator of surfaces, whose usefulness ("meaning") presupposes their emptiness (i.e. inherent meaninglessness).

15) Miller anticipates the theme of the story by referring to two things one should not inquiry too deeply into: God's and a wife's "privetee".

Pilate's voice is part of the pattern of mystery play references.

Miller is seen as a jangler and goliardeys - a kind of poet.

Chaucer places his narrator among the company of churls that includes also the Miller (see conclusion to this paper)

Nicolas often performs at the plot level what narrator does at verbal level: for instance, the "melody pun" (music=sex) is both narrator's and Nicolas'; the exposure of typology takes place at level of narratorial exaggeration as well as through Nicolas's subversive irony.

16) Quoted by, among others, Dante in Vita Nuova, XIII.

17) That pretext carried a good many problematic texts through the middle ages (e.g. Ovid's metamorphoses, Gesta Romanorum).

18) Chaucer's texts, I believe, were to be the first secular English texts to appear in manuscripts whose costliness and beauty might be felt to convey authority in a icon-contesting manner (not in his life-time, though).

19) Alastair Minnis demonstrates in articles and books on the "commentary tradition" that medieval scholars were highly conscious of the need to sift the Biblical text for the chaff of individualist and contextualist modifications of God's Word.

20) See, for instance, the Penguin Lit.Hist.

21) As mentioned, Chaucer, the Miller and Nicolas are linked in multiple ways (cf.n.15). One, however, is particularly significant: At the end of his grand Classical romance, TC, Chaucer invokes the "famous topos of six" to place himself among the great classics, "Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan, and Statius". In CT Chaucerian narrator ranges himself in another group of six:

Ther was also a Reve, and a Millere,

A somnour, and a Pardoner also,

A Maunciple, and myself - there were namo. GP, 542-4

Classical literati give way to low-life scoundrels.

22) Nicolas, in fact, not only changes the Flood story (i.e. subverts the bible); his privatisation of shared/public codes includes also rewriting (or a turning upside down of) the meaning of "fyn amour", as well as a reversal of social/marial pyramids.

23) Despite the narrator's confirmation that John speaks the truth, "no man his reson herde", ref. The moment also reinterprets in terms of the plot the madness that strikes men who have been close to God (), staging it as socially constructed madness, madness created through exclusion