The clerk of Chaucer's Franklin's Tale stands at the very edge of acceptability. His power to shape illusions is explicitly natural magic; he does not summon demons; and he is motivated in the end by generosity. Yet his illusions are intended to intervene in destiny, to render the impossible condition of Dorigen's promise possible, and thus to force her to yield to Aurelius. Such an outcome would have been based on illusion – but its unfairness and suffering would have been none the less real. The attempts of Aurelius and the clerk to alter destiny, rooted in an ethic of debt and payment, are finally replaced by grace, dependent on an ethic of generosity and gift. The setting aside of their demands cannot but place the use of natural magic in the tale as misguided. Chaucer need not be aligned with the Franklin, who expresses a conservative theological perspective in his severe condemnation of magic; indeed, Chaucer's interest in the occult sciences and the care with which he evokes the magician's practices, as well as the redemption of both the clerk and Aurelius, suggest a far more liberal and sympathetic perspective. But at the same time, magic is represented as dangerous, threatening precisely for the reality of its power and the possibility that individual destiny may be altered through manipulation of cosmic forces. In this respect, the Franklin's Tale is very different from the Squire's Tale, in which the magical gifts with their provenance from the East, or the world of faery, stimulate debate, marvel and adventure. The Franklin offers us an explicitly human practitioner, a clerk surrounded by his books, of a very different kind from the Clerk of Oxenford and closer to Shakespeare's Prospero. The foreknowledge of the clerk who greets Aurelius and his brother implies the existence of a circle of influential and learned practitioners, whose powers far exceed those implied in the description of Colle Tregetour's dinner-party trick, and who recall the cleric-magicians described so negatively by chroniclers. The emphasis on natural magic is crucial to preserve such figures from the charge of the demonic.