© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press 2005; all rights reserved
The Miller's Tale and Heile van Beersele
University of Connecticut
Chaucer is able to move three tubs into the rafters of John's ‘hostelrye’ in the Miller's Tale because halls in middle-class dwellings were used by fledgling English colleges for academic functions. In contrast, even a single hanging tub appears out of place in the prostitute's room on Cow Gate Street in Antwerp, the setting for the closely related story, Heile van Beersele. This detail and its accompanying narrative inconsistencies in Heile indicate that Chaucer's tale is the source of the Middle Dutch version, and indeed of the other later ones. This argument allows us to date more firmly the manuscript in which Heile survives and may encourage us to regard the Miller's Tale as an early work in this period of Chaucer's career; it also provides a striking example of an almost immediate transmission of a literary work from England to the Low Countries. Most significant, however, is that it lets us reconsider the place of the Miller's Tale within the structure of the Canterbury Tales.