The miller's tale

What Hacker News says

1. KineticLensmanMar 2023
   Chaucer is a really interesting author. I studied 'The Miller's Tale' in A-level English (aged 17 / 18), and loved the bawdy X-rated story that was smuggled in via weird medieval English.

   For a different perspective on another of Chaucer's characters, I also recommend 'Chaucer's Knight', by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame. The book is a bit controversial, but it's fascinating to see what appears to be a tale of courtly chivalry analysed by a modern satirist. Jones suggests that the Knight is really a blood-thirsty mercenary associated with multiple historical massacres, and points out where Chaucer is being satirically critical rather than simply praising the Knight.

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2. finghinApr 2026
   > In "The Miller's Tale", Geoffrey Chaucer writes "And prively he caughte hire by the queynte" (and intimately he caught her by her crotch),[14] and the comedy Philotus (1603) mentions "put doun thy hand and graip hir cunt."

   It turns out “grab her by the pussy” has surpringly robust precedent.

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3. cafardDec 2021
   In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales there is a smith in the Miller's Tale, who worked on farming equipment: plow harness, shares, and coulters. (Unless my Middle English is more forgotten than I thought.)
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4. sorokodOct 2019
   The obligatory History of the English language episode

   "In this episode, we explore the history of swearing and obscenities, and we examine Chaucer’s use of bawdy language in the Miller’s Tale"

   https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2019/09/25/episode-129-c...

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5. jack6eJan 2018
   Whenever people suggest that 21st-century content (namely that distributed through TV, but also in books) is somehow uniquely lascivious, I know they have not read any popular late-medieval or Renaissance literature. Anyone who has read Boccaccio's Decameron or even parts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, such as the Miller's Tale, is purged of any imagined celibate medieval period.

   Sex is not new, which means humans have been doing it (!), thinking about it, and talking/writing about it for a long time.

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