The Homosexual Pardoner and Chaucer's Social Tolerance

Abstract

A century and more ago George Lyman Kittredge proclaimed the Pardoner in Chaucer‘s Canterbury Tales to be a lost soul on the pilgrimage to Canterbury. Assuming that Chaucer held  his own values, Kittredge amply displayed the prevailing critical interest in psychologically complex characters, but not a hint of a prevailing fear of the queer that erupted in Chaucer criticism in the twentieth century.  The Pardoner‘s fortunes have varied since then, with historicist arguments about whether he is to be considered homosexual, and what “homosexual” as a label would mean when applied anachronistically to Chaucer‘s social context.  But also the discussion has focussed on the relationship between the Pardoner‘s manifest immorality as an ecclesiastical conman and his sexual indeterminism:  what does Chaucer mean by putting these things together? One thing for certain:  the Pardoner has something to say.  In the following essay, Roisin Boyle weighs the evidence for the complex question about the complex Pardoner, how culpable is Chaucer, within the limits of his own culture, of homophobia?  In Boyle‘s nuanced reading, neither character nor author can be simply glorified or simply damned.

Dr. Melissa Furrow