Flood, Famine, Contagion, and Comedy: Laughing at Environmental Catastrophe with Chaucer’s Miller and Nun’s Priest

ABSTRACT This article examines the comic depictions of environmental disaster in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale and Nun’s Priest’s Tale in light of real environmental disasters—floods, famines, and plagues—of the fourteenth century, in order to better understand how Chaucer’s comedy functions as environmental rhetoric. Ecocriticism and comedy theory are used to explore Chaucer’s comedy as a rhetoric that encourages resilience in the face of traumatic environmental events. In the Miller’s Tale, comic depictions of a prophesied flood bring fantasies of environmental control back down to earth and ground audiences in the reality of the moment. In the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, comic allusions to famine, plague, and agrarian collapse foreground human connectedness with many kinds of life. In both cases, Chaucer’s comedy encourages audiences to adapt creatively to the environmental challenges of their time.