The Canterbury Tales: The Pardoner's Tale Analysis

Late 14th century, On Pilgrimage from London to Canterbury, England/ On the Pardoner's Sales Trips / In a town and its environs in FlandersThe pilgrims in Chaucer's tales are traveling in the sprin...

Since the Pardoner's Prologue is his description of the techniques he uses when he's on the road selling relics and pardons, he narrates it in the first person. When he launches into the narration...

Like the Wife of Bath's Prologue, the Pardoner's Prologue is an autobiographical narrative in which he discusses his "tricks of the trade" and, in the process, reveals his sins to his audience. The...

The tone of the Pardoner's Tale definitely fits dictionary.com's definition of "sanctimonious": "making a hypocritical show of religious devotion, piety, righteousness, etc." The Pardoner rages aga...

The Canterbury Tales, including our Pardoner's tale, is written in iambic pentameter in rhyming couplets. Every two lines rhyme, and there's a heavily stressed syllable following a syllable with le...

This is the tale that the Pardoner tells on the way to Canterbury. Nothing complicated about that. In the medieval Catholic Church, higher-ranked clergy members like popes and bishops might sign or...

The epigraph to the Pardoner's Prologue and Tale is a bible verse from Timothy's first epistle in the New Testament, 1 Timothy 6:10-- Radix malorum est cupiditas. Ad Thimotheum. In English, it mean...

At the end of his tale, the Pardoner encourages the other pilgrims to come forward to make offerings to his relics or purchase one of his pardons. He tells them how lucky and honored they are to ha...

The Pardoner's Tale is in Middle English, which can be hard to read at first. But the Tale itself is an exemplum, or moral fable, that tells a fairly simple story in a concise and straightforward m...

Stage Identification: Three party boys gather in a tavern one morning, where they see a corpse go by. They learn that the body is that of a friend, and that he's just been killed by the same perso...

Anticipation StageThree party boys are gathered in a tavern one day when they see the corpse of their friend go by and find out he was killed by a mysterious stranger named Death.Our three "heroe...

Three party boys, gathered early one morning at a tavern to begin their drinking and gambling, see a corpse go by. Upon learning that it's the body of a friend of theirs, killed by a man called De...

Chaucer's Pardoner really captured the imagination of his contemporaries, including that of one anonymous poet who has the Pardoner hitting on a barmaid named Kit. (Source)The Pardoner refers to th...

Although we read a lot about drunkenness, lechery, and other nasty acts (including Lot's incest with his daughters) the Pardoner never goes much into specifics. This omission is interesting, becaus...

1 Timothy 6:10: Epigraph, and ll. 48, 140Lot: l. 199Herod: l. 202John the Baptist: l. 205Adam, Eve, and the Fall: ll. 219-225Paul (and his Epistles): l. 235, 243-247Sampson: l. 269Samuel: l. 299Lem...