The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

This is the Pardoner's Prologue from Geoffrey Chaucer's *Canterbury Tales* (late 14th century), written in Middle English verse — part of the framed-narrative tradition in which a diverse group of pilgrims tells stories in turn. The passage opens with the Host's emotional reaction to the preceding tale (the Physician's story of a slain maiden), after which he asks the Pardoner to follow with something cheerful; the other pilgrims redirect him toward something morally edifying instead. The bulk of the text is the Pardoner's remarkable self-confession, delivered before he tells his tale. He describes in precise detail the techniques of his trade: displaying forged papal credentials, peddling fake relics (including a sheep's shoulder bone he claims can cure livestock disease and cure jealousy), and manipulating parishioners with a stratagem that shames secret sinners into *not* coming forward to offer money, leaving only the "clean" to pay. His preaching theme is always "Radix malorum est Cupiditas" — greed is the root of all evil. The striking claim at the Prologue's center is the Pardoner's open, unapologetic admission that he preaches entirely out of his own avarice, not to save souls: he explicitly says he doesn't care whether his parishioners go to hell as long as they pay him, and that he would take money from the poorest widow even if her children starved. He distinguishes himself from apostolic poverty with contempt for the very ideal he nominally represents. What makes this passage distinctively powerful is its structural paradox — the Pardoner is confessing his fraudulence to an audience he is about to defraud again with a moral tale — giving Chaucer a vehicle for devastating satire of clerical corruption while also raising genuine questions about whether a corrupt source can produce a morally valid work.

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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