The Pardoner's Tale

In Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Pardoner's Tale," we are treated to a religious pardoner who is pretty much anything but religious. Instead, the Pardoner is a man whose rhetoric is designed to instill guilt in the other pilgrims so that he can profit off of selling them phony religious relics as a means of pardoning their sins. We first meet the Pardoner in Chaucer's "Prologue," in which we are told in no uncertain terms that the Pardoner is a scam artist who profits off of selling phony relics to unsuspecting parsons. As Chaucer (Prologue) tells us, "But with these relics, when he came upon / Some simple parson, then this paragon / In that one day more money stood to gain / Than the poor dupe in two months could attain. / And thus, with flattery and suchlike japes, / He made the parson and the rest his apes." Because of these and other ignoble qualities, Chaucer places the Pardoner at the bottom of his social scale.

In the "Pardoner's Tale," Chaucer's Pardoner provides a tale of thievery, gluttony, drunkenness, murder and other vices like prostitution. Three thieves drink to excess with dancing-girls of ill repute, causing the Pardoner to damn the sins of lust, drunkenness and gluttony, "O gluttony; full of all wickedness, / O first cause of confusion to us all, / Beginning of damnation to our fall," (Chaucer, p. 1). The Pardoner views drunkenness as a vice akin to gluttony. He also rails against gambling, which he maintains is a "cu

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