Another Look at the Hypocrisy of Chaucer’s Pardoner

For us, readers of chaucer living in an age when appeal to religious passions andsentiments as a means for the realization of worldly objectives by some charlatanshas grown significantly, reviewing the theme of religious hypocrisy treated in thecanterbury tales can be useful in a way that it proves a helpful means forrecognizing and dealing with the hypocrites. the pardoner of the tales is definitelyand consensually the most horrible hypocrite character in english literature, and thisis evident from both the narrator s description of this character in the generalprologue and in his own self-confession in the prologue to his tale. accordingly, thehypocrisy of the pardoner has been a matter of debates and discussions from thevery beginning of critical tradition on this character and his tale. the basic view ofthis critical tradition, however, is that in dealing with the hypocrisy of the pardonerand in creating this character, chaucer has drawn on different literary andtheological sources. the first part of this study is an attempt to trace instances of theinfluence of biblical definition of the word hypocrisy and biblical description ofhypocrites in the character of the pardoner. in the second part, the presence of tracesof the antichrist tradition with hypocrisy as a major attribute of the antichrist figurewill be treated in this character.