Figuring the Dangers of the "Greet Forneys": Chaucer and Gower's Timely (Mis)reporting of the Peasant Voice.

Description: Reads the Miller (whose mouth is compared to "a greet forneys" in GP) in the context of representations of rebel peasants in the chronicles of Thomas Walsingham, Henry Knighton, Jean Froissart, and the Anonimalle chronicler, as well as in Gower's "Vox clamantis" (Book I). The trope of fire links the peasants' literarily censored speech to the Miller's furnace-like mouth, but the Miller's subversive words are represented within the aristocratically acceptable genre of the fabliau, reinforcing how Chaucer acknowledges sociopolitical danger, but renders it comic.