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The Pardoner's Prologue And Tale - Online Term Paper

The Pardoner's Prologue And Tale



The Wife of Bath and the Pardoner are both given particularly ample space to expose their own way of living before telling their Tales, in developed Prologues which have certain qualities in common. In both cases, the speaker seems unaware that the hearers (the readers) might not be so full of admiration as they seem to be about themselves. Both speak in a rather boasting mode about lives and actions which others might find less than appealing. The Pardoner's Prologue is less lengthy than the Wife of Bath's but serves to provide a powerfully ironic frame to the sermon that forms the body of his Tale. The Prologue serves to make us aware of the difference that can exist between a Tale and ...

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there.
As seen in the General Prologue, a pardoner is a layman who sells pardons or indulgences, certificates from the pope by which people hoped to gain a share in the merits of the saints and escape more lightly from the pains of Purgatory after they died. This particular Pardoner works for a religious house notorious for fraud in this trade. Just as the indulgence bought with money seems to make confession, absolution and repentance unnecessary, so the fact that pardoners had permission to preach in the churches led to a confusion between them and ordained priests (who alone had power to absolve sinners from guilt).
There was widespread dissatisfaction with pardoners (as also with money-loving Friars) in Chaucer's time, and both were popular subjects of satire and joking. This can be found especially in parts of Piers Plowman, which Chaucer may have known. There was a fully developed satire of the avarice and corruption manifested by so many people associated with the Church, an ...

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encourage the unwilling to come forward by insisting that those guilty of sin, especially unfaithful wives, must stay in their places and not offer him money. As a result, he expects, no one will dare to hold back. He boasts that this relic-business brings him a hundred marks a year in private income.
Then turning to his preaching, he begins by stressing that his only goal is to get people's money; he expresses total indifference to the fate of their souls in a mocking reference to eternal damnation as 'goon a blackeberyed'. The only other reason he has for preaching is hatred: to attack and defame someone who has dared insult pardoners.
The strongest irony comes in lines (Riverside) ...

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PAPER DETAILS
Added: 2/12/2007 08:16:52 AM
Category: Book Reports
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 1833
Pages: 7

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