What is Chaucer's description of the Pardoner in the General Prologue?
Let's take a look at his description of the Pardoner in the General Prologue for clues about the Pardoner's social class and Chaucer's attitude toward him. Chaucer's description of the Pardoner suggests he's part of the Middle Age's emerging middle class.
How does Chaucer describe the Pilgrims in the prologue?
The Pardoner Character Analysis The Pardoner In his descriptions of the pilgrims in The Prologue, Chaucer begins with a description of the most noble, the Knight, and then includes those who have pretensions to the nobility, such as the Squire, and those whose manner and behavior suggest some aspects of nobility, such as the Prioress.
Who was the Pardoner in Canterbury Tales?
The Pardoner in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales would have felt right at home with the traveling pilgrims. They were headed to Canterbury as part of a religious ritual to visit the shrine of the martyred saint, Thomas Becket. These kinds of practices were commonplace in medieval England.
What is Chaucer's role in the Canterbury Tales?
His portrayal in the Canterbury Tales is part of a social commentary, something Chaucer achieved in the descriptions of all his pilgrims. Even though his tale is a "religious fable" warning of the dangers of sin, it's the Pardoner who reveals himself to be one of the biggest sinners of all.
How does Chaucer view the Pardoner?
Pardoners were laypeople who had the authority to sell indulgences, and Chaucer makes his Pardoner particularly bad. Through his narrator, whose voice is often ironic--seeming to convey information in an objective fashion but also criticizing it--Chaucer portrays the Pardoner as callous, immoral, and decadent.
How is the Pardoner described in the prologue?
Summary of the Prologue The Pardoner is a swindler, a smooth-talking cleric who offers pardons for sin in exchange for money (known as “indulgences” in the Middle Ages). He admits his hypocrisy, but his love for money, food, and liquor stop him from ending his vices.
How would you characterize the Pardoner?
The Pardoner is characterized as an effective speaker and a skilled con artist.
What is the Pardoner like in Canterbury Tales?
The Pardoner of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales is the epitome of avarice in medieval literature. He cheats his patrons, selling them fake religious relics, pedaling papal pardons for his own profit, and bragging about these exploits along the way.
What kind of character is the Pardoner?
Chaucer's Pardoner is a highly untrustworthy character. He sings a ballad—“Com hider, love, to me!” (General Prologue, 672)—with the hypocritical Summoner, undermining the already challenged virtue of his profession as one who works for the Church.
What is ironic about the Pardoner?
The Pardoner tells a story with the intention of teaching the company that greed is the root of all evil, yet he tries to swindle them and get contributions even after he admits they are fake. This is ironic because he should be practicing what he preaches, but he does the exact opposite.
Which word best characterizes the Pardoner in this passage?
He is impassioned and persuasive. Which word best characterizes the Pardoner in this passage? Which masters me—and that is avarice.
Is the Pardoner a moral man?
Of the twenty-four existing tales, the Pardoner's is one of the most intriguing. While he himself is an entirely immoral character, he tells an entertaining and very moral tale. The Pardoner's moral tale, while he is immoral, is a true example of Chaucer's ability to match tale to teller.
Is the Pardoner manipulative?
The Pardoner is known for cheating people and stealing their money through his selling of false relics. Through his tale, he manipulates his audience by inspiring repentance through his ability to evoke emotions of shame, guilt, and fear.
How is the Pardoner corrupt?
Here, the Narrator reveals telling details about the Pardoner, perhaps the most corrupt character in the group. Here, readers learn that the Pardoner uses false flattery to manipulate and make a fool of the local priest and congregation. In addition, the Pardoner uses his pleasing voice for profit.
What is the tone of the Pardoner's prologue could best be described as?
Sanctimonious, Emphatic, Humorous. The tone of the Pardoner's Tale definitely fits dictionary.com's definition of "sanctimonious": "making a hypocritical show of religious devotion, piety, righteousness, etc." The Pardoner rages against lots of different sins, despite the fact that he's guilty of all of them.
Which word best characterizes the Pardoner in this passage?
He is impassioned and persuasive. Which word best characterizes the Pardoner in this passage? Which masters me—and that is avarice.
What is the definition of a Pardoner?
pardoner (plural pardoners) One who pardons. (historical) In medieval Catholicism, a person licensed to grant papal pardons or indulgences.
How is the Pardoner in The Canterbury Tales described?
The Pardoner in the Canterbury Tales had bulging eyes and a voice like a goat. He lacked a beard and wore a simple cap that allowed his long hair t...
What did the Pardoner in The Canterbury Tales do?
The Pardoner in the Canterbury Tales represents the community of pardoners in the Catholic church who sell indulgences to people for the forgivenes...
Why is Chaucer's Pardoner bad?
The Pardoner is a complete fraud, and he's not shy about revealing this fact to the other pilgrims. He admits that his relics are false, and he con...
What Is a Pardoner?
Ever wonder how the building of those gorgeous and majestic Medieval cathedrals was funded? Well, some of the money came from the sale of indulgences, a lucrative scheme the Catholic Church devised for saving souls and generating revenue. But a money-making venture was not how indulgences were marketed. Rather, they were presented to the public as a form of absolution a person could purchase for the forgiveness of sin.
What is the pardoner in Chaucer's book?
Through his narrator, whose voice is often ironic --seeming to convey information in an objective fashion but also criticizing it--Chaucer portrays the Pardoner as callous, immoral, and decadent. He flagrantly makes a mockery of everything most people at the time would have considered sacred and makes a great living doing it. Although the Pardoner seems to be aware of the wrongness of what he does, he seems not to be bothered by it, as he is one of the most happy-go-lucky characters on the pilgrimage.
What is the pardoner's hair?
The narrator of the Tales says, ''This Pardoner had hair as yellow as wax ,/ Hanging down smoothly like a hank of flax/ In dribbles fell his locks behind his head/ Down to his shoulders which they overspread;/ Thinly they fell, like rat-tails, one by one./ He wore no hood upon his head, for fun.'' Chaucer gives his narrator an ironic voice; he often delivers information in a seemingly objective fashion but conveys more than he seems to intend. Here, by comparing the Pardoner's hair to rat tails, he appears to compliment the Pardoner's careful grooming while also hinting at the Pardoner's clever and unscrupulous character.
What does Chaucer say about the pardoner?
It is sometimes hard to tell, when reading about the Pardoner and hearing his tale, whom Chaucer means to criticize more harshly: the Pardoner for taking advantage of people's ignorance, or the people themselves for being so ignorant. The worst example of the Pardoner's deception comes in his own prologue to his tale, where he says, ''There's no apostle I would counterfeit;/ I mean to have money, wool and cheese and wheat/ Though it were given me by the poorest lad/ Or poorest village widow, though she had/ A string of starving children all agape.'' In this rather shocking line, the Pardoner admits that he would take money from the poorest peasant who would be simple-minded enough to believe his sales pitch.
What is the pardoner's most distinctive trait?
But perhaps his most distinctive trait is his callousness toward others . The narrator makes it clear that he is nothing but a conman who has absolutely no conscience about lying to people about the value of his wares: ''For in his trunk he had a pillow case/ Which he asserted was Our Lady's veil,/ He said he had a gobbet of the sail/ St. Peter had the time when he made bold/ To walk the waves, till Jesus Christ took hold./ He had a cross of metal set with stones/ And, in a glass, a rubble of pigs' bones.'' He sells these worthless objects to people by convincing them they are sacred or have healing powers.
What does the narrator say about the pardoner?
Continuing with the depiction of the Pardoner as a dandy, Chaucer's narrator says, ''The hood inside his wallet he had stowed,/ He aimed at riding in the latest mode.'' The Pardoner is indeed fashionable, so much so that the narrator seems to read him as effeminate: ''He had the same small voice a goat has got,/ His chin no beard had harbored, nor would harbor,/ Smoother than ever chin was left by barber./ I judged he was a gelding, or a mare.'' The Pardoner's effeminacy is important because Chaucer's Medieval audience might have read it as a sign of decadence.
What does it mean to enroll in a course?
Enrolling in a course lets you earn progress by passing quizzes and exams.
What does the pardoner carry with him?
Like the other pilgrims, the Pardoner carries with him to Canterbury the tools of his trade —in his case, freshly signed papal indulgences and a sack of false relics, including a brass cross filled with stones to make it seem as heavy as gold and a glass jar full of pig’s bones, which he passes off as saints’ relics. Since visiting relics on pilgrimage had become a tourist industry, the Pardoner wants to cash in on religion in any way he can, and he does this by selling tangible, material objects—whether slips of paper that promise forgiveness of sins or animal bones that people can string around their necks as charms against the devil.
What is Chaucer's pardoner's ballad about?
Chaucer’s Pardoner is a highly untrustworthy character. He sings a ballad—“Com hider, love, to me!” (General Prologue, 672)—with the hypocritical Summoner, undermining the already challenged virtue of his profession as one who works for the Church.
Who rides in the back of the party in the Canterbury Tales?
The Canterbury Tales. The Pardoner rides in the very back of the party in the General Prologue and is fittingly the most marginalized character in the company. His profession is somewhat dubious—pardoners offered indulgences, or previously written pardons for particular sins, to people who repented of the sin they had committed.
Can you cleanse yourself of sin by paying off the Church?
That said, the practice of offering indulgences came under critique by quite a few churchmen, since once the charitable donation became a practice allied to receiving an indulgence, it began to look like one could cleanse oneself of sin by simply paying off the Church. Additionally, widespread suspicion held that pardoners counterfeited the pope’s signature on illegitimate indulgences and pocketed the “charitable donations” themselves.
What are the sinners in Dante's Inferno?
In the ninth circle of Dante's Inferno, the circle just above the betrayers, are the simonists, those sinners who make a practice of selling holy items, sacraments, or ecclesiastical offices for personal profit . The punishment for such perversion of holy objects was very severe. Consequently, in the hierarchy of the medieval church, the Pardoner and his sin are especially heinous. The other pilgrims recognize the sins of the Pardoner, and their antagonism toward him is expressed by the Host at the end of the Pardoner's tale when the Pardoner has the effrontery and hypocrisy to try to sell one of his "pardons" to the Host.
Why is the pardoner placed at the very end of the descending order?
From his prologue and tale, the reader discovers that the Pardoner is well read, that he is psychologically astute, and that he has profited significantly from his profession.
What is the pardoner's sin?
The other pilgrims recognize the sins of the Pardoner, and their antagonism toward him is expressed by the Host at the end of the Pardoner's tale when the Pardoner has the effrontery and hypocrisy to try to sell one of his "pardons" to the Host.
Why is Chaucer at the bottom of humanity?
Yet Chaucer places him at the very bottom of humanity because he uses the church and holy, religious objects as tools to profit personally. In the other great classic of the Middle Ages, Dante's Divine Comedy, Dante arranges hell into nine concentric circles.
What is the character analysis of the pardoner?
The Pardoner. In his descriptions of the pilgrims in The Prologue, Chaucer begins with a description of the most noble, the Knight, and then includes those who have pretensions to the nobility, such as the Squire, and those whose manner and behavior suggest some aspects of nobility, ...
Is the pardoner the most evil?
Thus, while the Pardoner is the most evil of the pilgrims, he is nevertheless the most intriguing. The most provocative thing about the Pardoner is his open revelation about his own hypocrisy and avarice. Some critics have called him the most thoroughly modern character in The Canterbury Tales, especially in his use of modern psychology ...
Is the Canterbury Tales moral?
Likewise, his self-evaluation makes his character noteworth y: He maintains that , although he is not moral himself, he can tell a very moral tale.
