The Pardoner's Tale

In the literary context of the late fourteenth-century London, a group of pilgrims sets off to the shrine of St Thomas à Beckett, in Canterbury. The journey gives each of them the possibility to interact with their fellow travellers and to express their individual feelings and thoughts, ...

This article explores various kinds of maternal rhetoric featured by a series of female speakers in Fragment VI of the Canterbury Tales: from the Physician's Tale, the Goddess Nature fostering new birth and the maiden Virginia imitating Christ's mother; and from the Pardoner's Tale, Mother Earth enabling both germination and burial in her womb of clay. Each figure represents a point in the life cycle and advances a rhetoric related to it: the repetitious garrulity that marks Nature's maternity, the disciplined brevity that indicates Virginia's youthful chastity and foreshortened life, and the silence that withholds Mother Earth's knowledge of divine secrets regarding death. In Fragment VI, amplification and abbreviation, as well as methods for them taught by trivium masters such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf and John of Garland, are aligned with moments in the human lifespan, and examples of maternal rhetoric showcase word painting, Marian speech, and more.

The Pardoner has long been known as one of the most marginal characters of the Canterbury Tales, an "abandoned wretch" and "the one lost soul among the Canterbury pilgrims," as George Lyman Kittridge has called him, the very last of the pilgrim portraits for a reason. We have considered, among other things, his immorality, his fundamental lack, his despair, and his queerness-all of which alienate him from the group of pilgrims. This essay will consider, instead, the Pardoner's contact with the group. Drawing from my work on a confessional subgenre called forms of confession, I reread The Pardoner's Prologue and suggest that he participates in what I call domestic confession: the non-sacramental occasion of reading confessional material (including forms of confession) aloud, in a family or household group. By implicitly acknowledging a group's interdependence, domestic confession both illustrates and even requires collective or porous subjectivity-the ways in which people touch, bump up against,

This article introduces a strategic decision-game theoretic approach, the Pardoner's Dilemma, and juxtaposes it with the Prisoner's Dilemma. Game theory has emerged as a significant approach in the twentieth century for explaining strategic decision-making in numerous arenas, including economics, business, politics, ethics, international relations, biology, law, and war studies. 'Game theory' explains how and why players/actors/agents cooperate or conflict to procure their self-interests in a social world. Life is a game, and human, corporate, and artificial intelligent agents are players who play different games to maximise utility or minimise disutility. The Prisoner's Dilemma is a promising game-theoretic approach that explains strategic decision-making in zero-sum and non-zero-sum games. 'Strategic decision-making' means that the outcome does not depend upon the actions of a player but upon all players. There are numerous essential game strategies, including tossing, negotiation, bargaining, balloting, competition, chance, power, and arbitration. Although the Prisoner's Dilemma is a good gametheoretic approach, it does not allow players to use the key game strategies. In contrast, Pardoner's Dilemma is a game theoretic approach that not only explains zero-sum and non-zero-sum games but also allows the players to use different game strategies, such as negotiation, bargaining, tossing, chance, balloting, competition, arbitration, and power. The article develops and defends the Pardoner's Dilemma in the game-theoretic approach as an alternative to the Prisoner's Dilemma. The article claims that the Pardoner's Dilemma is a more promising approach than the Prisoner's Dilemma in the decisiongame theoretic framework. By introducing the Pardoner's Dilemma, the article enhances the scope of decision/game theory in social sciences.

In Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400), the arboreal is imbued with symbolic and allegorical meaning. Used by Chaucer as rhetorical devices, the trees in "The Merchant's Tale" symbolize fertility, while the tree in "The Pardoner's Tale" symbolizes death. In both tales, the arboreal functions allegorically, representing the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. By using nature in this manner, Chaucer creates ambiguity in his work, complicating the idea of knowledge in both tales.

The editorial staff of New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession works hard to ensure that contributions are accurate and follow professional ethical guidelines. However, the views and opinions expressed in each contribution belong exclusively to the author(s). The publisher and the editors do not endorse or accept responsibility for them. See https://escholarship.org/uc/ncs_pedagogyandprofession/policies for more information.

The editorial staff of New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession works hard to ensure that contributions are accurate and follow professional ethical guidelines. However, the views and opinions expressed in each contribution belong exclusively to the author(s). The publisher and the editors do not endorse or accept responsibility for them. See https://escholarship.org/uc/ncs_pedagogyandprofession/policies for more information.

The editorial staff of New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession works hard to ensure that contributions are accurate and follow professional ethical guidelines. However, the views and opinions expressed in each contribution belong exclusively to the author(s). The publisher and the editors do not endorse or accept responsibility for them. See https://escholarship.org/uc/ncs_pedagogyandprofession/policies for more information.

The Parson's penitential "meditaci01D1," which Harry Bailly describes as having "som vertuous sentence," points to the hereafter, appropriately concluding Chaucer's earthly tales of mirth and solas, joy and woe, comedy and tragedy. For like Troilus's vantage point in

As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Jason Herman entitled Intention, Utility and Chaucer’s Retraction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the

The Parson's penitential "meditaci01D1," which Harry Bailly describes as having "som vertuous sentence," points to the hereafter, appropriately concluding Chaucer's earthly tales of mirth and solas, joy and woe, comedy and tragedy. For like Troilus's vantage point in

The paper sets out to argue that the Pardoner's atypical sexuality is subversive of the medieval gender matrix and that his challenge to heteronormativity is ultimately encompassed and disarmed. Chaucer presents the Pardoner as a genderly ambiguous Other who does not fit the compulsory pattern of the two biological sexes. In its pronounced otherness and difference, his queer body disrupts the medieval normative order. Paradoxically, however, his difference re-inscribes that very order and reinforces the institutional status quo. His transgressive potential is met by containment and heterosexual hegemony is eventually re-established and reaffirmed.

Despite few overt references to the Second Plague Pandemic (1348-1840), The Canterbury Tales (c.1387-1400) offer a compelling psychogram of a diverse community processing massive demographic shifts in the wake of recurrent epidemic waves. Building on Boccaccio’s The Decameron (1349-52), which tells of a group of noblemen escaping plague-stricken Florence, Geoffrey Chaucer imagines a motley crew of survivors journeying towards the shrine of a local plague saint, Thomas Becket at Canterbury. Echoes of the Black Death reverberate throughout the work, most noticeably in the Pardoner’s Tale, which allegorizes the plague’s contagiousness and lethality, but also through satirical pandemic archetypes including a greedy plague doctor (the Physician), contagious fellow travellers (the Cook and the Summoner), fallen socialites (the Knight and the Prioress), wealthy inheritors (the Wife of Bath), rivalling opportunists (the Miller and the Reeve), and corrupt clergy (the Pardoner). Postpandemic social change is also reflected in volatile social and linguistic codes (such as skewed forms of address), while socio-economic grievances are delivered through maladaptive child modes reminiscent of trauma literature. Significantly, egocentric coping mechanisms dominating the pilgrims’ discourse are regularly countered by visions of collaborative inclusivity (the Host’s), mutual altruism (the Franklin’s) and genuine piety (the Parson’s).

The editorial staff of New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession works hard to ensure that contributions are accurate and follow professional ethical guidelines. However, the views and opinions expressed in each contribution belong exclusively to the author(s). The publisher and the editors do not endorse or accept responsibility for them. See https://escholarship.org/uc/ncs_pedagogyandprofession/policies for more information.

Poetry, being one of the two main categories of literature in general, has recently been subject to subordinate attention in literatures in terms of form, especially the poetic part of medieval epoch. Alongside the structural and semantic aspects of poetry, there still remain some elements of this style not fully investigated and developed. Amongst such we can name end-stopping andenjambment, which are some categorical elements, most of the poets, either intentionally or ignorantly, have administered from the medieval era to the present time. In this paper, the existence of enjambment and end-stopping was investigated in three of most renowned poetic works of Middle-English era, including Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Gower's Confessio Amantis, Langand's Piers the Plowman. By comparing the original text of the poems with the translated form of them, it was understood that the existence of end-stopping was more significant and the number of end-stopped lines were more than enjambed ones. It was then concluded that medieval poets, specially these three, used mostly a language simple in structure and easy to understand syntactically, free from the complexity that enjambment brings to the lines.

This article looks again at the figure of the Pardoner in the Canterbury Tales and reconsiders the possibility that 'he' is a woman passing as a man. The importance of such a reading is revealed by exploring the anxieties this raises over the relationship between outward appearance and inner substance or reality, and demonstrating parallels with medieval anxieties over the authenticity of relics and the validity of religious speech acts, including those involved in the transubstantiation of the elements of the Eucharist.

This essay pursues imperfect analogies between Chaucerian poetics and border theory/pedagogy, drawing on the author’s experience teaching Chaucer in the US-Mexico Borderlands. It calls for reading Chaucer from the classroom and from the margins, in order best to locate Chaucer and medieval studies in leaner, less canon-driven, and more effectively anti-racist 21st-century curricula.

Death has long been a topic in concern for all humans. Regardless of gender, nationality or time period, we all reach the same destination: death. However, the interpretation of death itself does not always stay the same, but radically evolves throughout history, as reflected in multiple literary works. This paper, therefore, will examine the evolution of death notions with special regards to England from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century-from the time of persistent threat of the Black Death to the modern colonial period. Exploring the death of the three rioters in "The Pardoner's Tale" of Geoffrey Chaucer's masterpiece Canterbury Tales (1387-1400) and the protagonist's death in "Oroonoko" of Aphra Behn (1688), the paper will dissect each death to illustrate its relationship with the contemporary common belief. Following the indepth multi-dimensional analyses of other critical book and journals besides the primary texts, this research will also indicate the shift from the medieval romantic and religious mindset to the dominance of realism and humanistic world before the 1800s in England. Over time, we cease to perceive death as a necessary means to pay for sins, but witness the replacement of a totally different frame of mind, in which the colonists become "the Almighty" and death for justice disappears from scene.

The contrast between Dorigen's faithfulness to her husband in the Franklin's Tale and Alison's deceit towards Absolon and John in the Miller's Tale illustrates how women are held to a religious double standard in which they must sacrifice their freedom for gentillesse in order to be deemed morally good, but the hypocrisy of the Pardoner reveals how gentillesse is a product of the church used to oppress women from moving up the social hierarchy. Therefore, the only way for women to see through this inherent corruption is to obtain trouthe through the rejection of gentillesse, which ultimately results in questioning God's justice.

A survey of how sexuality is written about in Chaucer using close readings of specific passages: the Pardoner's GP Portrait, Pandarus' "joking" (attempted?) rape of Crisyede in "Troilus and Crisyede" Book 3, the Wife of Bath's praise of sexual love in her "Prologue," and "The Envoy to Scogan."

-it was a code of behavior for knights (fighting men) requiring bravery, honor, courtesy, protection of the weak, respect and courtly love for women, generosity, fairness to enemies (i.e. the use of "might for right"-NOT "might makes right") -if the code of chivalry was violated by a knight he would lose his honor among his fellow warriors Norman England 9. The First Crusade:

Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to New Literary History. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Generations of scholars have analyzed the culminating tale of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales—The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, asserting the confessional theme, sermon structure, sacramental hermeneutics or reconciliation results of it. While looking at these assertions, it is intriguing to find how these themes and structures reflect our current Roman Catholic Sunday mass. This essay will attempt to piece these approaches together as the sequential components that mirror our Sunday Eucharistic celebration. This essay will suggest the Pardoner’s confession to the other pilgrims in the Prologue mirrors The Penitential Rite. Most importantly this essay will bring forth the idea that the first part of his tale reflects the Liturgy of the Word. And as he tells the tale of the old man and three rioters, it mirrors a Homily or a Sermon. Finally with the help of the Knight, the Pardoner reconciles with the Host which mirrors the Creed bringing unity upon parishioners. This paper will also look into Hans Boersma’s Heavenly Participation, and its discussion on sacramental ontology in tandem with the thesis of The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale mirroring the Roman Catholic mass. I will also reference Norman Harrington’s views on The Pardoner’s Prologue as a confessional link. Before looking at The Pardoner’s Tale as the Liturgy of the Word and a Homily, I will contrast Rodney Delasanta’s theory on the tale having sacramental elements. Although in tandem with my analysis, Delasanta’s theory can be seen as a fragment of a Roman Catholic Eucharist celebration. I will then proceed to incorporate Roger Ellis and Alan Gardiner’s debate on whether The Pardoner’s Tale has sermon elements, as well as Robert P. Merrix analysis of a medieval sermon structure. This essay will also briefly look into the similarities and differences of biblical reference and values The Parson’s Tale and The Pardoner’s Tale have. And with a brief look at Chaucer’s Retractions, the ending of The Canterbury Tales, will be argued as an ever-unfolding Eucharistic feast.

In the literary context of the late fourteenth-century London, a group of pilgrims sets off to the shrine of St Thomas à Beckett, in Canterbury. The journey gives each of them the possibility to interact with their fellow travellers and to express their individual feelings and thoughts, their interiority and imaginative world as well as their wordly experience, with its contradictory values, its tensions between feudalism and urban culture, its complex social relationships. This pilgrimage becomes the perfect setting for the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner, two of the most complex and verbally aggressive characters of the Canterbury Tales.

By means of some veiled hints related to the figure of the Pardoner, Chaucer introduces his readers to a peculiar character whose ambiguous moral and sexual identity might be discovered in a far-flung Germanic past once prevailing in Anglo-Saxon England. The description given in the General Prologue recalls Old Norse Gylfaginning where Snorri Sturluson tells the story of Loki: a god who once turned into a mare. It is plausible to think that Chaucer might have drawn from a faded mythologema still known and accessible to his readers’ understanding. This Pardoner–Loki correlation stands as another testimony of the Pardoner’s homosexual nature.