Pardoner's Miracle Cures

Superior Essays
Miracle Cures sheds light on the daily life of citizens in medieval Europe, where the only hope for curing an illness was to travel distances for a possible healing. Chaucer shows the purpose of a pilgrimage as an opportunity to cleanse the body of sins. The Pardoner, one of Chaucer’s characters, sells indulgences, pardons and relics. However, he admits to having sins himself, notably, his avarice for money. Chaucer crafts a contradictory character showing that the Pardoner can be successful at his job, despite the fact that he does not practice what he preaches. Through the Pardoner’s actions, Chaucer criticizes the language the Pardoner uses in order to attain more customers and the contradiction between the ideal and the real motivation that the Pardoner has towards the customer and the customer has towards the Pardoner. Miracle Cures gives an insight to one’s way of living by praying for a healing and justification of one’s curing their sins. …show more content…
People often believed if caught by sickness it was “because of their sins” and blamed one for the lack of caring for oneself. It was often said that “Satan gained power over people’s bodies as well as their souls[…] devil could enter the body and corrupt it” indicating that God was the almighty and fear-inducing, Satan had power over one’s body, and the devil could corrupt one’s body - suggesting that people had no place to escape, therefore had to become perfect humans. In order to cure a sin, the best way was to “sincerness was diagnostic of sin, the way to treat it was to confess transgressions and do penance […] only certain way to stay healthy was to attain and remain in the state of grace” (Scott 70-71). By remaining in the “state of grace”, one was able to achieve the ideal way of living and began to fear making mistakes. Knowing the important cycle of committing a sin of becoming an outcast of a society after becoming ill, people often feared others who were ill and attended pilgrimages to cleanse the body of all sins. The Pardoner’s use of high class language and emphasizing the seven deadly sins indicates the medieval European citizens are easily persuaded. The Pardoner starts off his tale with “Radix malorum est cupiditas” in Latin meaning greed is the root of all evil and repeats again in order to convey his great knowledge and higher class by using a foreign language. Chaucer uses the Pardoner as a practical joke that he is trying to act like a upperclassman - criticizing the Pardoner for being a social climber because the Pardoner is looking down on people who are better than him. While at an inn with the other pilgrimages eating dinner, the Pardoner recites “O cursed gluttony, our first distress!” one of the seven deadly sins and causes men to lose its conscious where they seem unintelligent for their actions, “first temptation” meaning gambling lessens the value of men’s power and wealth, and offends god by “damnation” or swearing (Chaucer 245). Furthermore, “Gluttony” has “corrupted” people on earth by wanting to be drunk, more money for gambling, or simply wanting more and altered people’s moral values of being religious and not committing sins (245). The Pardoner asked the other pilgrimages to have dinner in order to tell his tale, but he purposefully recited his tale during dinner to make people feel guilty of eating, therefore people would want to buy the Pardoner’s relics for his own profit. The use of exclamation points indicates how passionate the Pardoner is about committing sins and selling his relics for money, and the importance of his audience to listen to his speech. Without washing off one’s sins by buying the Pardoner’s relics, one was unable to reach the “state of grace”, the ultimate goal, and was said to either go to hell or purgatory (Scott 71). From the Pardoner’s deceiving tricks of making his audience want to buy his relics by accentuating that committing sins would make one go to hell, Chaucer criticizes people’s persuasion and the church's corruption. Chaucer uses the Pardoner and citizens to further expose the contradiction between the character’s ideal and reality lifestyle to criticize the character's true motivation of acting pretentious. The Pardoner starts the tale by

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