Miller's Tale and the Life of ChristWhen Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, he created most of the individual tales by "borrowing" and reworking material from various sources. Most of these stories would have been very familiar to his medieval audience, and the changes he made to the standard version of these tales for his work would have been a form of tacit communication that added an extra dimension to each of them. Howard says that "...stories possess their own relationship to a world of other texts. They can be understood only by reference to shared linguistic formulas or generic features..." (448). In Miller's tale Chaucer parodies the Knight's Tale, which itself was "adapted from a longer tale...from Italy...by Boccaccio" (Howard 448), combining and satirizing highly irreverent references to the life of Jesus Christ with the story of Oedipus to make the story as obscene and comical as possible. Miller's tale features a carpenter, John, his wife, Alison, and a student lodger, Nicholas. The identification of John as a carpenter immediately causes the audience to relate these characters to another famous carpenter and his wife, namely Joseph and Mary of the Bible. (quote) John's character is similar to Joseph not only in their shared profession, but also in the situations they shared with their wives before marriage. Chaucer mentions how it was a rather rash move for John to marry Alison, a woman much younger than him. He says “He might have known, if Cato were on his shelf, / A man should marry someone like him” (89). Just as Joseph was wary of marrying Mary because she was already pregnant, to the point that he "didn't want to expose her to p...... middle of paper ...... t flood, he cuts the ropes holding her tub to the ceiling and falls to the ground, breaking his arm in the process. The ridicule that John receives from neighbors who have been told that he is crazy, serves to create a triumph sufficient to symbolize the resurrection of Christ would have been so dramatic simply consisted of Nicholas recovering or defeating Absalon because it would not have achieved Nicholas's main goal of "killing" his father and "marrying" his mother Works Cited Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales England: Penguin Books,. 1977. Howard, Donald R Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World New York: EP Dutton, 1987. New International Version Michigan: Zondervan Bible Publishers, 1988.Wilson, AN Jesus: A Life New York: WW Norton & Company, 1992.