The Canterbury Tales is a literary masterpiece in which the brilliant author Geoffrey Chaucer sought out to accomplish various goals. Chaucer wrote his tales during the late 1300's. This puts him right at the beginning of the decline of the Middle Ages. Historically, we know that a middle class was just starting to take shape at this time, due to the emerging commerce industry. Chaucer was able to see the importance and future success of the middle class, and wrote his work with them in mind. Knowing that the middle class was not interested in lofty philosophical literature, Chaucer wrote his work as an extremely comical and entertaining piece that would be more interesting to his audience. Also, Chaucer tried to reach the middle class by writing The Canterbury Tales in English, the language of the middle class rather than French, the language of the educated upper class. The most impressive aspect of Chaucer's writing is how he incorporated into his piece some of his own controversial views of society, but yet kept it very entertaining and light on the surface level. One of the most prevalent of these ideas was his view that certain aspects of the church had become corrupt.

By making the Pardoner a eunuch, Chaucer accomplished his goal of writing with deeper meaning and symbolism while maintaining an entertaining work one again. The effect of this on his audience was one of disgust and intrigue, but Chaucer had other intentions that stemmed from Biblical text. The Bible mentions two types of eunuchs: those who became eunuchs for spiritual reasons, and those who became eunuchs unspiritual reasons. The first type of eunuch sought to cut themselves off from worldly desires. If a member of the church was to be a eunuch, this was the only acceptable type. In fact Deuteronomy 23:1 condemns unspiritual eunuchs by commanding, "No on who had been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of God" (Santa Biblia 247). However, the audience knows that the Pardoner is not a spiritual man, so it certainly was not for spiritual reasons. It can be assumed, however, that the Pardoner cut off his genitals because he was a very distorted individual who secretly wished to be a female. In attempt to keep this a secret, the Pardoner interrupts the Wife of Bath's prologue to announce that he desires to have a wench in every town (Helterman 2). Later the reader realizes this was simply a cover up when the Pardoner sings a "song of carnal, rather than spiritual, love" to the Summoner (Miller 182). To Chaucer this was the ultimate of hypocrisies. A eunuch who was, according to the Old Testament, not even supposed to be allowed in church, he made a leader of the church. Also, a spiritual eunuch chooses to cut himself off from temporal desires, but Chaucer's Pardoner choose to cut himself off from spiritual desires. These underlying messages of hypocrisy give the educated reader an idea of Chaucer's personal views of some of the pardoner's in the church. Also, the manner in which Chaucer used both obvious character flaws of the Pardoner, and deeper hypocrisies of his nature, show the depth and genius of his writing.

The Pardoner is very open about his hypocrisy and does not show any sign of remorse for it. In preaching to his audiences his theme is always "Radix malorum est cupiditas" (Chaucer 1672), which means, greed is the root of all evil. However, he then proudly admits, "Avarice is the theme that I employ in all my sermons, to make the people free in giving pennies-especially to me. My mind is fixed on what I stand to win and not at all upon correcting sin." and also boast, "By such hornswoggling I've won, year by year, a hundred marks" (1673). The simple fact that a person with such an evil heart, so full of greed, could be successful at accomplishing a duty of the church, makes evident the fact that there must be something morally wrong with that duty itself. Also, the fact that the Pardoner so openly admits his corrupt actions causes the reader to question whether this is not common practice among pardoners.

The second way that Chaucer ingeniously attributed corruption to his Pardoner was though ph

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Approximate Word count = 2005
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)