FHS2 T3 (pardoner etc) secondary

(quotation) Burger, 2003: 140

an equation between properly active masculinity and right reading is, of course, a commonplace of medieval hermeneutic theory

(quotation) Dinshaw, 1989: 157

Put in hermeneutic terms, the Pardoner's clothed body suggests that the existence of the letter of the text does not at all ensure the existence of a spirit, a truth beneath it

What does Gross argue? (1995)

Links language, idolatry and sodomy, arguing that Chaucer is drawing on a line in medieval poetics which links idolatry and sexual practices seen as 'unnatural' - sodomy as metaphor for unnatural uses of language.

What does Burger argue? (2003)

Uses Sedgwick and Butler to read the Pardoner through ideas of queer performativity, while ultimately basing his argument on a Hegelian self/other distinction

What does Dinshaw argue? (1989)

Attempts to explain the Pardoner's psychology through Lacan and Freud.

Argues that straightforward gender categories of masculine and feminine do not apply to the Pardoner. The uncertainty over what is under his clothes and this difficulty of defining him is paralleled by the uncertainty that there is any meaning or truth beneath his words.

What does Stockton argue? (2008)

Uses Lacan, alongside Žižek and Bataille, to think through materiality, and the pardoner's undermining of belief structures.

What does Benson argue? (1982)

That the very slipperiness of the Pardoner as a character, and in Chaucer's description of him, is demonstrative of the weakness of a queer reading of him.

(quotation) what does burger argue about the relics? (2003: 152)

association with the more ambiguous 'cutting edge' of pilgrimages, relics, and indulgences is transgressive and dangerous precisely because it is congruent with the desires of the rest of the company

(quotation) Stockton on the pardoner and belief (2008: 15)

his performance calls into question the structure of faith underwriting the pilgrimage itself

What does Spearing argue? (2003)

Argues that the old man in the Pardoner's Tale does not fit into any pre-existing categories, and thus fails to fulfil didactic role.

Tale, despite its professed teaching against cupiditas, collapses boundaries between sins.

Distinction between audience (pilgrims) and us (readers) is likewise collapsed, we are all ignorant listeners to his preaching.

What does Lochrie argue? (2005)

That there was no such thing as a heterosexual norm before the 20th century, and our categories of normal/abnormal do not apply to the Medieval past.

The real opposition is not between heterosexuality and sodomy, but between sexuality and chastity.

Problematises the category of sodomy, which is not the opposite of heterosexuality in medieval theological discourse, and erases female forms of sodomy.

(quotation) Ingham and Bale on the Manciple (2020: 225)

the morals here perform the very thing they warn against: too much language, a tongue unrestrained

(quotation) Spearing on exemplum and fable (2003: 197)

"his clearest instances of exemplum or fable do seem to involve tensions in the relationships between stories and doctrinal truths" and that friar, pardoner, nun's priest and manciple "can be read as demonstrations of ways in which stories do something other than convey the meanings to which they are explicitly yoked"