Hostname: page-component-6bb9c88b65-dwch4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-07-26T10:48:55.417Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Kissing the Pardoner

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Glenn Burger
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The conceptual dominance of the “heterosexual” in modern thinking has conditioned us, when we consider the Canterbury Tales, to think about the Pardoner and his audience in essentialist terms. The Pardoner and the Host's kiss, however, stills and defers attempts by the masculine gaze of Harry and the “redeemed” pilgrims to control what the Pardoner means. By returning meaning to circulation, the kiss provides an instance in which the Pardoner's body can do more than simply deconstruct categories or gesture elsewhere for meaning. Offering an alternative view of the Pardoner's supposed “destructive otherness,” this essay suggests that his true import lies not in his alterity but in his similarity to the other pilgrims and ultimately to us as readers—in short, that the Pardoner constitutes the “open secret” of the Canterbury project.

Information

Type
Cluster on Chaucer
Information
PMLA , Volume 107 , Issue 5 , October 1992 , pp. 1143 - 1156
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Works Cited

de Lille, Alain. De planctu naturae. Satirical Poets of the Twelfth Century. Ed. Wright, T. London: Longman, 1872.Google Scholar
Benson, C. David. “Chaucer's Pardoner: His Sexuality and Modern Critics.” Medievalia 8 (1985 for 1982): 337–49.Google Scholar
Bloch, R. Howard. Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.Google Scholar
Bloch, R. Howard. “Silence and Holes: The Roman de silence and the Art of the Trouvère.” Yale French Studies 70 (1986): 81–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bossy, John. “Blood and Baptism: Kinship, Community and Christianity in Western Europe from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries.” Sanctity and Secularily: The Church and the World. Studies in Church History 10. Ed. Derek Baker. Oxford: Blackwell, 1973. 129–12.Google Scholar
Bossy, John. “The Mass as a Social Institution, 1200-1700.” Past and Present 100 (1983): 29–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boswell, John. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.Google Scholar
Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.Google Scholar
Chambers, Ross. Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.Google Scholar
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Benson, Larry D. Boston: Houghton, 1987.Google Scholar
Curry, Walter Clyde. “The Secret of Chaucer's Pardoner.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 18 (1919): 593–606. Rpt. in Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences. By Curry. 2nd ed. New York: Barnes, 1960. 54–70.Google Scholar
Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Charles S. Singleton. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970–19.Google Scholar
Delany, Sheila. “Sexual Economics, Chaucer's Wife of Bath, and The Book of Margery Kempe.” Writing Woman: Women Writers and Women in Literature, Medieval to Modern. New York: Schocken, 1983. 76–92.Google Scholar
Dinshaw, Carolyn. “Eunuch Hermeneutics.” Chaucer's Sexual Poetics. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989. 156–15.Google Scholar
Dix, Dom Gregory. The Shape of the Liturgy. London: Dacre, 1945.Google Scholar
Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Clarendon–Oxford UP, 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eberle, Patricia J. “Commercial Language and the Commercial Outlook in the General Prologue.” Chaucer Review 18 (1983): 151–15.Google Scholar
Finucane, Ronald C. Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England. London: Dent, 1977.Google Scholar
Frese, Dolores Warwick. An “Ars Legend!” for Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: Re-constructive Reading. Gainesville: U of Florida P, 1991.Google Scholar
Geary, Patrick J. Furta Sacra. Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilman, Sander L. Sexuality: An Illustrated History. New York: Wiley, 1989.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Jonathan. “Colin to Hobbinol: Spenser's Familiar Letter.” South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 107–10.Google Scholar
Jones, George Fenwick. “The Kiss in Middle High German Literature.” Studia Neophilologica 38 (1966): 195–210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jungman, Josef A. Public Worship. Trans. Howell, Clifford. Collegeville: Liturgical, 1957.Google Scholar
Kamowski, William. “‘Coillons,‘ Relics, Skepticism and Faith on Chaucer's Road to Canterbury: An Observation on the Pardoner's and the Host's Confrontation.” English Language Notes 28 (1991): 1–8.Google Scholar
Kempe, Margery. The Book of Margery Kempe. Trans. Windeatt, B. A. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1985.Google Scholar
Knapp, Daniel. “The Relyk of a Seint: A Gloss on Chaucer's Pilgrimage.” ELH 39 (1972): 1–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leicester, H. Marshall, Jr. The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Major, J. Russell. “‘Bastard Feudalism’ and the Kiss: Changing Social Mores in Late Medieval and Early Modern France.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17 (1987): 509–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McAlpine, Monica E. “The Pardoner's Homosexuality and How It Matters.” PMLA 95 (1980): 8–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mertes, R. G. K. A. “The Household as a Religious Community.” People, Politics, and Community in the Later Middle Ages. Ed. Rosenthal, Joel and Richmond, Colin. New York: St. Martin's, 1987. 123–12.Google Scholar
Miller, D. A. “Secret Subjects, Open Secrets.” The Novel and Police. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. 192–220.Google Scholar
Miller, Robert P. “Chaucer's Pardoner, the Scriptural Eunuch, and the Pardoner's Tale.” Speculum 30 (1955): 180–18. Rpt. in Chaucer Criticism. Ed. Richard, J. Schoeck and Jerome Taylor. Vol. 1. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1960. 221–44. 2 vols.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moore, R. I. The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.Google Scholar
Nicholson, Lewis E. “Chaucer's ‘Com Pa Me’: A Famous Crux Reexamined.” English Language Notes 19 (1981): 98–102.Google Scholar
Perella, Nicholas J. The Kiss, Sacred and Profane: An Interpretative History of Kiss Symbolism and Related Religio-erotic Themes. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.Google Scholar
Richmond, Colin. “Religion and the Fifteenth-Century English Gentleman.” The Church, Politics, and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century. Ed. Dobson, Barrie. New York: St. Martin's, 1984. 193–208.Google Scholar
Ricoeur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language. Trans. Czerny, Robert and McLaughlin, Kathleen. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1977.Google Scholar
Rowland, Beryl. “Animal Imagery and the Pardoner's Abnormality.” Neophilologus 48 (1964): 56–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rubin, Miri. Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.Google Scholar
Smith, Bruce R. Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.Google Scholar
Stockton, Eric W. “The Deadliest Sin in the Pardoner's Tale.” Tennessee Studies in Literature 61 (1961): 47–59.Google Scholar
Storm, Melvyn. “The Pardoner's Invitation: Quaestor's Bag or Becket's Shrine?” PMLA 97 (1982): 810–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sumption, Jonathan. Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion. London: Faber, 1975.Google Scholar
Vance, Eugene. “Chaucer's Pardoner: Relics, Discourse, and Frames of Propriety.” New Literary History 20 (1988–89): 723–72.Google Scholar
Vance, Eugene. “Chretien's Yvain and the Ideologies of Change and Exchange.” Yale French Studies 70 (1986): 43–62.Google Scholar
Ward, Benedicta. Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record, and Event, 1000–1215. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1982.Google Scholar