Preview

How Is There Corruption In The Canterbury Tales

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
825 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
How Is There Corruption In The Canterbury Tales
The poem The Canterbury Tales, written by Geoffrey Chaucer, is an account of a pilgrimage of diverse people traveling together to Canterbury. The pilgrims go to visit the shrine of St. Thomas Beckett to thank God for allowing them to survive the winter. But before the thirty pilgrims leave, meet Harry Bailey, the owner of the Tabard Inn, who proposes they have a contest where each pilgrim will tell four tales on their journey. The winner of this journey will win a free dinner at the Tabard Inn. In this poem it is clear how Chaucer creates a corrupt image of the Church. Chaucer though doesn’t believe that the entire Church is crooked because he describes the Parson as being a faithful servant of God and the best priest of all. But besides the …show more content…
A friar in medieval times were pledged to live a life of poverty, but that is not the case for this friar. He received a license from the pope so that he could hear confessions. But, the Friar would require the sinner to give him money or a gift for him to hear there confessions. He was also an impressive beggar, as he could get money from everyone for his own personal wealth. The Friar also had an immoral habit of sleeping with young girls. Chaucer explains, “And pocket-knives, to give to pretty girls,” because he would take the virginity of these girls, and he would then marry them off to pay for their virginity (238). Then these girls would have to cut themselves so that they would bleed on the sheets, so they would appear to be virgins. The Friar was definitely not a good model of the Medieval …show more content…
Immoral acts from summoners can also be found in “The Friar’s Tale”. The Friar tells this tale to insult the Summoner, to prove how the Summoner his worse than him, which is ironically about an archdeacon who is a summoner. This summoner uses whores as spies to find the secrets of the common folk so that he can later on blackmail these sinners. The Friar then ends his tale by hoping that all Summoners can pay for their sins and eventually become moral

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Chaucer’s The Pardoner would fit best in Dante’s eighth circle. This is known as the fraud circle. This circle is also broken down into ten different Bolgias. The Pardoner would fall under Bolgia three. Bolgia three is committing the sin of Simony. One commits simony when they sell ecclesiastic favors and offices, to make money for themselves out of what rightfully belongs to God. People would come to the church to repent of their sins, and often would give charitable donations. However, the pardoner began to pock people’s donations. So, before people would just give money out of charity, but then it became required to pay. Basically people were paying to have their sins repented, but instead of the money going to the Church they were going…

    • 406 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Chaucer's “The Canterbury Tales” is a satirical comedy about corruption in the Church during the 14th century. During the time period in which the Canterbury Tales was written the Church was extremely prevalent in almost all aspects of a person’s life and was prone to corruption. Christianity was not only the primary religion of Europe, but it was also one of the primary authorities as well. However, after the Black Death, many Europeans became more skeptical of the authority of the church. This is expressed in the text, “The Tales reflect diverse views of the Church in Chaucer's England. After the Black Death, many Europeans began to question the authority of the established Church. Some turned to lollardy, while others chose less extreme…

    • 1109 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer portrays 26 pilgrims with their virtues and vices. The Parson was a religiously devout and wise man, who despised cursing, so he charged for it. The Wife of Bath has the strength to stand up for herself over any male, but is very lustful and extreme in her beliefs of matriarchal dominance, to the point of being sexist.…

    • 511 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Geoffery Chaucer wrote twenty-four tales but the most noticeable of these twenty-four tales are "The Pardoners Tale" and "The Wife Of Baths Tale". The Wife of Bath's Tale" is the more likely candidate to win against "The Pardoner's Tale" in the morality side. The reason her tale has morality is the goodness of the poor and broken. Once her story is near its end and the knight, her protagonist, is face to face with the old woman, the antagonist, the wife's message becomes clear. The very first of her ideas is that gentleness, the most prized quality by the upper class, does not come from the class that someone is born into but rather their choices. In "The Pardoner's Tale" the pardoner sells the church's pardons to people who have sinned and seek absolution. He also preaches against sins, mostly avarice. Ironically, in the prologue to his tale, he admits being guilty of that sin and is quite proud of it. His tale is also about greed; in it, death takes three greedy men to their early graves.…

    • 609 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the Pardoner's Tale, Chaucer writes about a man who preaches to his audience for money. The pardoner speaks of three men that lost their lives due to greed. This leaves the reader with the knowledge that money is the root of all evil. I think the whole world is nothing compare to the pardoner's greed. The pardoner admits that his job is not to encourage people to become better from sin, but to make himself rich. According to the text “but let me briefly make my purpose plain, I preach for nothing by for greed of gain”. Also he even goes so far as to say that he would steal from the poorest page, the widow and even a starving child if it meant that he would gain from the process.…

    • 450 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The lower class wanted what the upper class got with ease. “These tensions permeated the boundaries of class, gender, ethnicity, and religion. The interaction between rural and urban classes led to the establishment of new political organizations and laws designed to balance the needs of competing classes.” The previously shown quote expresses that even slight changes can cause a person to overcome with an extreme sense of greed. Then the other article A Distant Mirror, there are cases of greedy habits expressed heavily. “[In the fourteenth century]money could buy any kind of dispensation: to legitimize children, of which the majority were those of priests and prelates.” Back in these times, it was ok to give money to legitimize children and have it called a “pardon”. The people collecting the money don’t really care about the child, they only do it for their own gain, just like The Pardoner in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.…

    • 634 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the journey of Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer paints a vivid image of the medieval world. He brings forth three prominent concepts in the General Prologue, Pardoner's Prologue and Tale, and The Wife of Bath’s Tale. All tales satirically drenched with persuasive ideas, most would agree that his iconoclastic stories are dangerous for introducing aloud a different view on the church, gender relations and economic divisions. Creating doubt against the morals and true intentions of the church, bringing to light the inequality between genders and proposing a division between economic classes.…

    • 794 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Over a century prior to Luther’s “blasphemous” reformation, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote in his Canterbury Tales rhetoric warranting excommunication by the Catholic Church. Specifically, “The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale” interprets certain church practices as inherently immoral, a notion insinuating that the most influential organization in Europe was flawed. However, the pardoner’s characterization had merit; the Medieval Period saw the corruption of the papacy through indulgences, a practice catalyzed by a religious fervor in the wake of the Black Death.…

    • 419 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The pardoner, in Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale,” is a devious character. He is a man with a great knowledge of the Catholic Church and a great love of God. However, despite the fact that he is someone whom is looked at with respect at the time, the pardoner is nothing more than an imposter who makes his living by fooling people into thinking he forgives their sins, and in exchange for pardons, he takes their money. His sermon-like stories and false relics fool the people of the towns he visits and make him seem as a plausible man, which is exactly what the pardoner wants. In fact, the pardoner is an avaricious and deceitful character whose driving force in life is his motto, “Radix malorum est cupiditas,” which is Latin for “greed is the root of evil.” The pardoner’s entire practice is based upon his motto and is motivated entirely by greed.…

    • 1390 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Canterbury Tales are an acclaimed selection of stories comprised into one large book; an example of one story in the tales is the “Pardoners Tale”, which is a riveting story that preaches the morality of greed. Greed is an intense or selfish desire, and in the story, greed is objectified in the form of money. The tale describes the journey of three boisterous, young men who are on a hunt for justice. While on this journey the men stumble upon an immense amount of gold yet to be claimed. Upon the discovery of the gold each man devises a plan to swindle the others out of the money. Ultimately, all of the men succeed in their attempts to eliminate the competition, but unfortunately none of them survive long enough to reap the benefits. A lesson…

    • 314 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Pardoner

    • 721 Words
    • 3 Pages

    From the pardoner’s portrait it is believable that the host has a right not to believe this guy, and/or just him for that matter. In the tale Chaucer states that with him the pardoner carries around a jar full of pig bones which he was able to cheat out a poor parson out of two months’ salary. It is said that the pardoner was good at preaching, but in his story it explains he only does it to win money, berating the people of their sinfulness in order to get them to buy what he is selling.…

    • 721 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    In The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, many characters go on a religious pilgrimage to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket. On the way to Canterbury, each person on the journey tells a tale. Whoever tells the best story, gets rewarded a lavish free meal. The pilgrimage includes people from the nobility, clergy, and commoner class. For each class, Chaucer develops many different character types that were representative of the society of the time. With a broad spectrum of people and action, The Canterbury tales consists of many different ideas such as social satire, courtly love/ chivalry,morality, and corruption and deceit. One of the most important ideas of the story is that Chaucer puts forward a criteria that…

    • 1909 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Geoffrey Chaucer, in his Canterbury Tales, felt that the Church's turmoil experienced during the fourteenth century contributed to the a declining trust of clergy and left the people spiritually devastated. The repeated epidemics that the European Church experienced weakened the church by highlighting the clergy's inability to face adversity. The clergy's inability to provide relief for the people during a period of suffering did not turn people away from the church, but it did cause the people to question the value of the Church's traditional practices. People looked for ways to gain greater control over their own spiritual destines and altered their perception of the clergy, who were too weak to bring the people complete salvation. (Bisson51-52) "The times are out of joint, the light of faith grows dim; the clergy are mostly ignorant, quarrelsome, idle, and unchaste, and the prelates do not correct them because they themselves are no better." (Coulton 296) In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer makes us highly aware of the clergy's obvious and hidden intensions. Chaucer shows his awareness of the shortcomings of the Church in his portrayal of those who exercise spiritual authority during the pilgrimage. (Bisson 51-52)…

    • 1153 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    The Pardoners Tale

    • 1105 Words
    • 5 Pages

    The art of persuasion proves to be an important aspect within “The Canterbury Tales” because it is this art that a pilgrim needs to exemplify in order to be deemed the best storyteller. Not only is this art the driving force behind the overarching plot of the poem but it is also an essential facet for characters within the tales so they are able to provide a complex and thought-provoking story. Understanding that the storytellers are on a religious pilgrimage, one of the most common ways this art is portrayed is through the use of biblical references. This portrayal is especially prevalent in understanding the plot and themes of “The Pardoner’s Tale.” To explain, the biblical stories in “The Pardoner’s Tale” are used in two-fold: the Pardoner uses biblical stories to make his sermon more persuasive to the other pilgrims, while Chaucer uses the actions of the Pardoner in juxtaposition with biblical stories to portray a criticism of Medieval culture to his readers. Through analysis of this two-part structure, I will first examine Pardoner’s use of the biblical story of Adam and Eve’s banishment from Paradise in regard to the rhetorical strategies of ethos, logos, and pathos. I will then examine Chaucer’s criticism of the Medieval Church through analysis of the Pardoner’s motivations behind giving his sermon in juxtaposition with the biblical reference.…

    • 1105 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Canterbury Tales

    • 528 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The Pardoner worked for the Church and was despised by many churchgoers. In return for making donations to charitable enterprises, the Pardoner was licensed by the Pope to sell papal indulgences. People would give money in exchange for pardons and the Pardoner would then pocket that money. He was a great preacher, who preached about all the right things. In this way, he could convince people that they needed to buy these pardons to be forgiven by God. The Pardoner openly sold fake relics and convinced people that they were real. On the way to Canterbury, he was not hesitant to admit that his relics are fake and that he cheats people out of their money by constantly preaching that “radix malorum est cupiditas” (Greed is the root to all evil). He even told a story about three young men who died and lost all of their money by being greedy. After telling his Tale, the Pardoner asks the Host to come buy one of his relics. This is an example of how confident the Pardoner is about cheating people out of their money.…

    • 528 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays