The Pardoner's Prologue By Chaucer

“Chaucer was writing at a time when there was no tradition of personal poetry in a later Romantic sense: a poet never made his individual emotions the subject matter of his poetry.” (Woolf) Chaucer is often times regarded as the father of English literature. He is also widely considered one of the most significant, if not the top poet of the Middle Ages. One of his most incredible texts is known as the Canterbury Tales. This is a collection of over twenty stories that were written in Middle English during the time of the Hundred Years’ War, toward the end of the 14th century. This text is argued as having made a variety of contributions to modern society, one of those being the literary use of English rather than French or Latin. The Canterbury …show more content…
When it comes to Chaucer’s issues with the church, it is not so much his issue with the institution of religion itself, or even religious people, what he despises is the hypocrisy, strive for power, and greed. In order to express his distain with these aspects of the institution, he uses a satiric approach within both The Pardoner’s Prologue and The Pardoner’s Tale. He does this by taking a figure that is supposed to be displayed as fundamentally religious, and causing him to do things that are incredibly corrupt, a sort of scaled down version of what the church as a whole has begun to do. “I stand, and when the yokels have sat down, / I preach, as you have heard me say before, / And tell a hundred lying mockeries more.” (Pardoner’s Prologue, 125) Chaucer felt as though the church was beginning to develop into an institution that was using its religious abilities to convince people that money would be enough to save themselves from their sins, a representation that was satirically displayed by the corrupt religious figure The Pardoner. Chaucer did not necessarily despise the church, or even the religious figures within it, he just felt frustrated by the church’s allowance for individuals of this kind. “The nature of Chaucer’s satire of the pardoner . . . is not directed against false pardoners or …show more content…
The final institution attacked by Chaucer is the one revolving around the idea of gender roles. This idea is one that is also attacked satirically through his development of the Wife of Bath. The wife of Bath is essentially the go-to character when it comes to the representation of feminist ideals, which is precisely why Chaucer is often times regarded as the first feminist. In order to combat the idea that women are made simply to marry and reproduce, Chaucer develops the argument through the Wife of Bath that essentially destroys this idea through her attack on marriage and her ability to challenge men. “The form of her counterattack takes is that of appropriating the instruments or institutions of masculine power. Both the public world of storytelling and the story itself are by definition male-dominated, and the Wife, as we know, has strong feelings about that.” (Leicester) The fact that the Wife of Bath has the nerve to stand up in front of a car full of religious men and speak her mind is a challenge to traditional gender roles in itself. Not only that, but the Wife of Bath outwardly challenges a man when the Pardoner dares to speak up about her preaching and she responds firmly to him. In response to the Pardoner’s comments