Chaucer's The Pardoner

A detailed Summary of Chaucer's The Pardoner


"Chaucer's Pardoner: A Character Sketch"

Geoffrey Chaucer was a people watcher. During diplomatic errands throughout Europe, Geoffrey Chaucer learned about the people who surrounded him. This is what made it possible for him to write The Canterbury Tales. The Canterbury Tales were a collection of stories about a group of thirty people who are on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. Chaucer intended that each person tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back. This idea made this project much too big for Chaucer to ever be able to finish.

One of Chaucer's characters in the Canterbury Tales was the Pardoner. In the dictionary, a pardoner is a medieval ecclesiastic authorized to raise money for religious works by granting papal indulgences to contributors. In the Middle English dictionary a pardoner was a seller of indulgences, a rascal, or scoundrel. The Pardoner was a scam artist. He sold relics that were just pig bo


Before the Canterbury Tales were written, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote all of his view and opinions of each person down in the Prologue. The area of the Prologue that talks about the Pardoner describes him as a man with "hair as yellow as wax, Hangling down smoothly like a hank of flax." The Pardoner had a beautiful singing voice, which he used to his advantage by singing loud and merrily in order to get more money from the people.

It is ironic that the moral of this Pardoner's Tale is greed is the root of all evil yet the Pardoner himself is greedy. The Pardoner is also a hypocrite because everything he did was for his own selfish and greedy purposes yet he is so strongly against everything he himself does. The Pardoner sang beautifully in order to gain the trust of the churchgoers so that he could scam them by selling them relics at high prices but these relics were not real. For example, instead of being a piece St. Peters sail, it was just

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Approximate Word count = 639
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Novels

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