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Article: `SHOT WYNDOWE' (MILLER'S TALE, I.3358 AND 3695): AN OPEN AND SHUT CASE?
- Article from:
- Medium Aevum
- Article date:
- March 22, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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What kind of a window is the `shot wyndowe' that is such a crucial feature of the Miller's Tale? The term itself is rare: it occurs nowhere else in Chaucer's works, and is not recorded again before Gavin Douglas's translation of the Aeneid (1513).(1) This lack of linguistic context produced an early uncertainty about the form and meaning of shot. The word is found unchanged in the two earliest and best manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, Ellesmere and Huntington, and in a majority of others, but in a significant portion of the total (some twenty of the eighty surveyed by Manly and Rickert) there is considerable variation.(2) For Miller's Tale line 3358 there are ten ...