The Canterbury Tales: The Pardoner's Tale Resources

Hints for Middle English pronunciation.

This page contains a brief summary of the tale, along with information about and links to its probable sources. It also gives a good overview of the critical debate surrounding the Pardoner's sexual identity with links to the relevant articles.

Luminarium's page on the Pardoner's Prologue and Tale links to other informational websites about it, as well as critical bibliographies, images, and audio files.

The Pardoner's Tale is one of the eight tales covered in this extremely bawdy and irreverent take on Chaucer's work.

In this modern adaptation of the Pardoner's Tale, three unemployed bums try to cash in on the disappearance of a local girl by pretending to take up a collection for the search.

Some people think that this 1948 movie starring Humphrey Bogart (based on a novel of the same name by B. Traven) is the most recent adaptation of the morality tale upon which the Pardoner's Tale is based.

The speech of Fals-Semblant's (or False Seeming) from the allegorical 13th Century French Roman de la Rose, by Jean de Meun, is one of Chaucer's likely sources for the Pardoner's description of his tricks of the trade.

As Chaucer does with the Pardoner, Boccaccio satirizes the sale of false relics in his Decameron, in this case in the character of a friar named Cipollo (which means "onion" in Italian).

The Novellino, or One Hundred Old Tales, is a collection of stories in medieval Italian widely considered the precursor to the Decameron. It contains two stories with similar plots to that of the Pardoner's Tale.

In the mid-fifteenth century, someone with intimate knowledge of the Canterbury Tales created a version that rearranged the tales and inserted an interlude in the middle, during which the pilgrims arrive in Canterbury and the Pardoner hits on a barmaid.

This animation accompanies Baba Brinkman's version of the Pardoner's Tale from his larger project, "The Rap Canterbury Tales."

Check out SNL's episode of 1/27/79, where Father Guido Sarducci discusses a trip to Mexico with the Pope and his discovery of some holy relics, including Jesus' high school graduation picture and the bill from the Last Brunch.

A quickie cartoon version of the tale.

Really. You gotta watch it.

Professor John Fleming is interviewed about the Tale.

The image of the Pardoner from the Ellesmere Manuscript.

Another version of our guy.

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A modern depiction of the murderous and stupid revelers.