Abstract
The Pardoner has traditionally been seen as the most sinful or “aban- doned”1 of all of Chaucer’s pilgrims, the “one lost soul”2 in the Can-terbury group, to use an often-repeated critical formula. At least until quite recently, this moral status has been regularly, though not universally, associated not only with the Pardoner’s unorthodox body, but also with an unorthodox sexuality. The Pardoner’s physical description in the General Prologue allows him an effeminate, but still ambiguous, gender identity, and ever since Walter Clyde Curry’s analysis of the medical details of this description,3 its details have typically been taken to imply that he is some sort of eunuch. In addition to this apparent status as a eunuch, the Pardoner has also been more problematically regarded as “homosexual,” and the moral condemnation of his “homosexuality” has been assigned considerable thematic importance by those critics who accept it. According to one such critic, for instance, the Pardoner attempts to divert the other pilgrims from the true purpose of their journey, and his “diversionary malfeasance gives thematic significance to his unsavory relationship with the Summoner.”4
This Somonour bar to hym a stif burdoun (I, 673)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
George Lyman Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1915; repr. 1927), p. 211.
Walter Clyde Curry, Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences, 2nd ed. (NewYork: Barnes and Noble, 1960), pp. 54–70. See chapter 2.
Melvin Storm, “The Pardoner’s Invitation: Quaestor’s Bag or Becket’s Shrine?” (abstract), PMLA 97 (1982), p. 797.
Muriel Bowden, A Commentary on the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (New York: Macmillan, 1948), pp. 274–76.
Monica McAlpine, “The Pardoner’s Homosexuality and How It Matters,” PMLA 95 (1980), p. 14.
Steven F. Kruger, “Claiming the Pardoner: Toward a Gay Reading of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale,” Exemplaria 6 (1994), p. 138. A progressive and very useful critique of the essentialist assumptions of a number of earlier critics on the subject of the Pardoner’s erotic practices may be found in Gregory W. Gross, “Trade Secrets: Chaucer, the Pardoner, the Critics,” Modern Language Studies 25.4 (1995): 1–33, especially pp. 2–15.
C. David Benson, “Chaucer’s Pardoner: His Sexuality and Modern Critics,” Mediaevalia 8 (1982): 337–49.
Richard Firth Green, “The Sexual Normality of Chaucer’s Pardoner,” Mediaevalia 8 (1982): 351–58.
Donald R. Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 344–45.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (1978; repr.Vintage: New York, 1980), p. 101.
Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 214–18.
Peter of Abano, Expositio problematum Aristotelis (ed. 1475), 4.26, trans. in Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, p. 214, quoted p. 214 n. 161.
Mark D. Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 133.
Peter Damian, “Letter 31” (Liber Gomorrhianus) in Die Briefe des Petrus Damiani, ed. Kurt Reindel, 4 vols. (Munich: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 1983), 1:287; “Letter 31” (The Book of Gommorah), trans. Owen J. Blum, O.EM., in Peter Damian: Letters 31–60, The Fathers of the Church: Mediaeval Continuation 2 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1990), pp. 6–7.
James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 533. And cf.
John W Bald-win, The Language of Sex: Five Voices From Northern France Around 1200 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 43–47, on the wide va-riety of erotic practices condemned as sodomitical.
Elizabeth B. Keiser, Courtly Desire and Medieval Homophobia:The Legitima-tion of Sexual Pleasure in Cleanness and Its Contexts (New Haven: Yale Uni-versity Press, 1997), p. 95. See also Jordan’s discussion of Aquinas on pleasure, Invention of Sodomy, pp. 155–56, and his essay, “Homosexuality, Luxuria, and Textual Abuse” in Constructing Medieval Sexuality, pp. 24–39.
John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Cen-tury (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 330.
Michael Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Me-dieval Period (Santa Barbara [?]: Dorset Press, 1979).
It should be noted at this point that Jan Ziolkowski, by decoding Alan’s metaphors, has emphatically not made it possible to discuss same-sex erotic practices in medieval literature unambiguously; in a curious disclaimer, he states at the outset that his book is not really concerned with “homosexu-ality,” but only with linguistic metaphors: “the first chapter is not intended as a contribution to the study of medieval views on homosexuality. Rather, it is meant to set the stage for an exploration of the attitudes toward gram-mar which prompted Alan to choose grammatical metaphors as a vehicle of expression for his thoughts on many issues.” Like such heterosexist Chaucerians as Storm, Ziolkowski’s language erases same-sex desrie even when it is crucial to his own argument. See Jan Ziolkowski, Alan of Lille’s Grammar of Sex (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy, 1985), p. 4. Despite Ziolkowski’s reservation, at least one recent critic has attempted a “queer” reading of Alan’s text itself
Elizabeth Pittenger, “Explicit Ink,” in Pre-modern Sexualities, ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 223–42. See also Alexandre Leupin’s deconstruction of Alan’s use of the sodomite and hermaphrodite: “The Hermaphrodite: Alan of Lille’s De planctu Naturae,” in his Barbarolexis: Medieval Writing and Sexuality, trans. Kate M. Cooper (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 59–78. And cf. Keiser, Courdy Desire, pp. 74–86. Gross ex-plores another manner in which Chaucer translates Alan’s rhetorical strate-gies in order to associate the Pardoner with sodomy: Alan’s term for rhetorical defects, uicium, is also used metaphorically to designate the prac-tices of the sodomites, and in English becomes Chaucer’s “vice,” as in the Pardoner’s admission that he is “a ful vicious man” (Gross, “Trade Secrets,” pp. 23–31).
Eve Kosofiky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 74, apparently referring to Ephesians 5:3–12; see n. 38, above.
Luce Irigaray, ’This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Car-olyn Burke (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 26.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 17.
Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” in her The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), p. 32.
Copyright information
© 2000 Robert S. Sturges
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sturges, R.S. (2000). The Pardoner’s Different Erotic Practices. In: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-61877-4_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-61877-4_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-61879-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-61877-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)