Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale" as a Parody of Courtly Love

A woman is a creature to be treated like an angel of God. She is beautiful, honorable, and chaste. The sanctity of a woman is not only worth fighting for, it is worth dying for. Her glove on plate mail is a harmonious battle cry, a motivation both formidable and divine. Always painfully proper and never morally compromised, she is the embodiment of righteousness. I shall love her from afar, as she will love me …

…show that extramarital affairs are only an engagement in immorality, especially if the affair be under the guise of holy love. As men, Absalon and Nicholas should have loved Alison with the love of highest admiration, and she should have loved them the same way. Rather than love each other in the right fashion, they succumbed to physical temptation, and thus were morally devoid characters. A woman is an angel, not an object of lust.