ABSTRACT
There is the nameless clerk of the University of Orleans who performs the astrological magic in the Franklin’s Tale. Nicholas was the Oxford student in the Miller’s Tale who predicted a second Noah’s flood to his landlord, old John the carpenter, and so gained access to old John’s young wife Alison. Geoffrey Chaucer devotes about thirty lines right at the beginning of the tale to a rather full portrait of Nicholas, his lodgings, his character, and his scholarly interests. Chaucer devotes most of the portrait to Nicholas’ interest in it, telling us how the shelves at his bed-head contained Ptolemy’s Almagest, the standard textbook of astrology, and an astrolabe, that medieval instrument for observing the positions of the stars, superseded by the sextant. It is noteworthy that Chaucer takes pains to tell us that Alan and John, who beat up the Miller, were from Strother in the North; and Chaucer depicts them as speaking in a pronounced northern dialect.
