How Is Chaucer Portrayed In The Pardoner's Tale

Geoffrey Chaucer’s famous medieval classic, The Canterbury Tales, offers its readers a vast array of characters. This God’s plenty features numerous unique and challenging individuals, but there is one specifically who stands out as particularly interesting. The immoral Pardoner, who, in a sense, sells away his soul for the sake of his own avarice, puzzles many modern readers with his strange logic. Already having laid his considerable guilt upon the table, this corrupted agent of the Church attempts to pawn off his counterfeit relics for a generous price. His actions are slightly troubling and mysterious, but his shameless misdeed is easily explainable if a reader chooses to interpret the man as a symbol rather than a fully formed human

supposed to see that the money is death, and is lying at the root of

Hypocrisy is a common attribute attributed to many of Chaucer’s religious characters in The Canterbury Tales. They are greedy, drunks, and people without a moral code. In The Pardoner’s Tale this theme is exemplified. The Pardoner is greedy and drunk. Matthew 19:24 (ESV) says, “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” Despite this, the Pardoner’s only goal is to scam as many people as he can with his “pardoning” of sins. The Pardoner would pretend to have objects blessed by the Vatican and sell them to people as an indulgence for future sins. It is doubtful that any of his objects had even been to Rome. Therefore, when the Pardoner starts his tale, it is one full of hypocrisy and deceit. Arguably, Chaucer’s grievance was not specific to the Pardoner. Rather, Chaucer used this character to make a wider point about the corruption of religion during the fourteenth century.

In the story, “The Pardoner’s Tales”, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the character the Pardoner in descriptive way. He describe the Pardoner’s corruption teaching and the way the Pardoner act in the tale. The religious that the Pardoner teaching is corrupted and very selfish, greediness, and gluttony. This thing are all opposite to what the real church religious is teaching. In the story, he tricks the people to buy his fake relics and other things by using the church’s believe. The Pardoner act and his teaching are all corrupted because of the church. It shows the side of greediness, gluttony and selfishness which highly reflect into himself and his believe.

In medieval times, almost all things were under the influence of the church. The church was considered to be the most important aspect of the society at the time and had always told people right from wrong. This is where The Pardoner’s Tale becomes interesting. In Chaucer’s medieval poem, it is clear that the Pardoner is out to make money to fulfil his own greed rather than actually being concerned about the other people’s concerns about life and death. In the poem, the Pardoner is representing to church, it is believed that it was Chaucer’s intent to create this

In the short story “The Pardoner's Tale”, written by Geoffrey Chaucer discusses three men trying to find the murderer of their friend who was being carried in a coffin as they were having a drink. Specifically he notes that ’death’ has taken over the village and someone is killing the young men in the village without anyone seeing any action taken place but the dead corpse lying on the ground. “If we can only catch him, Death is dead!” said the men.(Chaucer 130) And the men were determined to find this unknown murderer. They ran into an old man who said he had left death by an oak tree,only for them to find a pile of golden florins.

He uses health concerns of that time in the Pardoner’s Tale. He also use the abuses in the Catholic Church in the Friar’s Tale. Geoffrey Chaucer was a brilliant writer, he used things that were happening around him to educate his readers and readers to come.

To begin, back in the days on Geoffrey Chaucer, religion was ruled by one and only one church, the Roman Catholic Church. He never really agreed with the ways of the church so he wrote a series of tales making fun of the people of England and the ways of the church. Even though he was purposely making fun of the church, he had to be careful of the way he said some things. With some of the characters he creates, Chaucer finds himself apologizing in advance for what he is about to say; or what the characters were about to say. By doing this Chaucer is using satire. Satire is when you say something but mean another or the opposite of the thing you say. Most of Chaucer’s tales are not appropriate for high schools, but of

The Root of Evil Exposed in The Pardoner's Tale   "The root of all evil is money."   Because this phrase has been repeated so many times throughout history, one can fail to realize the truth in this timeless statement.   Whether applied to the corrupt clergy of Geoffrey Chaucer's time, selling indulgences, or the corrupt televangelists of today, auctioning off salvation to those who can afford it, this truth never seems to lose its validity.   In Chaucer's famous work The Canterbury Tales, he points out many inherent flaws of human nature, all of which still apply today.

In Chaucer’s famous novel: The Canterbury Tales, he describes many characters in a satirical way, while others he describes with complete admiration. The narrator (a constructed version of Chaucer himself) is staying at the Tabard Inn in London, when a large group of about twenty-nine people enter the inn, preparing to go on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. After the narrator talks to them, he agrees to join them on their pilgrimage. Although, before the narrator progresses any further in the tale, he describes the circumstances and the social rank of each pilgrim. There are two characters in these tales of the same social class, but Chaucer’s opinion on them vary greatly. These two characters are the beloved Parson, and the loathed Pardoner.

Chaucer’s Pardoner is a highly untrustworthy character. He sings a ballad with the Summoner and is already undermining the already challenged virtue of his profession as one who works for the Church. He presents himself as someone who is unclear with their gender and sexual orientation and challenging social norms. The Pardoner carries with him on the pilgrimage the tools of his trade. Within his case is a 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 that he passes off as saints’ relics. Visiting relics on pilgrimage had become a tourist industry and the Pardoner wants to gain money from religion in any way he can.

Chaucer lived in a time dictated by religion and religious ideas in which he uses The Canterbury Tales to show some of his views. Religion played a significant role in fourteenth-century England and also in Chaucer’s writing. His ideas of the Church are first seen in “The Prologue,” and he uses seven religious persons to show the influence of the religion in his writing. Although many of his characters appear to portray part of the corruption in the Church, he does give a small example in which one can conclude that he is speaking in praise.

In the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer introduces a variety of characters with a multitude of personalities. From the despicable Summoner to the abrasive Miller, these characters are created with their own personalities and their own human failings. One common fault that characters share is hypocrisy. From pretending to be wealthy to cheating the poor out of money, hypocritical tendencies are abundant in the Canterbury Tales. Throughout the story, Chaucer ridicules the human criticizes the human failing of hypocrisy through the examples of the Pardoner, the Merchant, and the Friar.

During the medieval times corruption in the Catholic Church was prevalent. As corruption was prevalent during Chaucer’s time so was a Pardoner’s practice of selling indulgences, becoming one of deception and greed. Similar to the upper class focusing their time on becoming the richest and most powerful. In many of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer would use satire to criticize different social classes. For example, the middle class, those people who worked for their possessions. He satirizes religious hypocrisy in such tales as the Pardoner, in which a middle class man, showing the corruption of the Pardoner’s job. Through his description of the Pardoner as being a man who is disitful, greedy, and hypocritical, Chaucer uses

The Knight, for example, is chosen to narrate the first tale. He is in the highest position from a social standpoint and displays the most admiring virtues for a medieval Christian man-at-arms: bravery, prudence, and honor. In contrast, belonging to the clergy, the Pardoner serves the author’s purpose of criticizing the church, as the character is exceptionally good at faking relics and collecting profits in his own benefit. Chaucer portrays in this tale the disagreement with the excess wealth and the spread corruption in Church at that