The Canterbury Tales: The Pardoner's Tale Language and Communication Quotes

"An hauteyn speech" is a loud, impressive speech, one that everyone can hear. The Pardoner's able to make his pitch so well because he knows it all by heart. This keeps him from needing to look down at a book; he can direct his speech right at the audience. Every salesman knows that you have to rope in your audience to make the sale; the Pardoner has practiced this speech so he can be entertaining and look spontaneous, sincere, and convincing. If you've ever had to attend a lecture where the teacher read from notes, you know what we mean.

Psychologists and advertisers know that creating a particular mood in someone can make him or her act in certain ways. The Pardoner knows this, too. The success of his business depends upon his ability to stir up emotions like guilt in his listeners, and he preaches specifically about greed so that people will be ashamed to hang on to their money. They give it to him and feel virtuous and generous. Preaching about God's love wouldn't make him any money.

The medieval church knew that the true word of God could be distorted and used for ungodly purposes by people like the Pardoner. The question of whether a sinful person could give a sermon that really inspired repentance was hotly debated. The Pardoner tells the pilgrims that sermons can be preached for other reasons than true piety and that a sermon motivated by greed or other evil reasons can still convince its hearers to repent. No self-interest at all in that point of view, right? Shmoop can't imagine believing a word of what someone says if we thought they were lying, greedy, drunk hypocrites. Having said that, maybe the difference was that the Pardoner's audiences were hearing what they believed to be the word of God. And they all chose to attend a sermon on penitence. So regardless of the character of the sermonizer, the words might still be helpful and uplifting.