"The Wife of Bath's Tale" and "The Miller's Tale" are alike in being among the most popular and often-read stories in The Canterbury Tales. Both capture the imagination in that they are entertaining and irreverent. Both reflect the secular, middle class status on the tellers, who are neither aristocrats nor clergy, and both are informed by the knowledge of their tellers. The Wife of Bath might be a self-made woman without an aristocratic bone in her body, but she knows courtly, aristocratic literature well while the bawdy, drunken Miller knows the Bible (as does the Wife, as shown in her prologue). Both tales subvert the romance genre, the Wife's by making a woman's desire for power and choice central, the Miller's for showing the sordid rather than the courtly side of life.

The two stories differ, however, in that the thematic focus in the Wife's tale is on the serious issues of compassion and woman's rights, while the Miller primarily wants to tell a bawdy, comic tale that pokes the courtly love genre in the eye with crude, physical humor. The Miller's Tale shows people being manipulated and played for fools, while the Wife's tale, in contrast, shows the knight gaining empathy for women as he allows his wife to make her own choice about how to present herself.