Allegory: The Tale
It's possible to read the Pardoner's Tale as an allegory in which the characters and events represent abstract concepts rather than "real" people or situations. The presence of the mysterious stran...
Penitence
The Pardoner's tale, in fact much of The Canterbury Tales, is about penitence. It's about a pilgrimage to seek penitence from a saint's relics. Penitence was a subject very important to Chaucer, an...
Relics and Pardons
Relics may seem weird to us today—pieces of bone from the saints?—but they were very popular in medieval times. Ornate containers, called "reliquaries," were made to hold the body parts, and th...
The Old Man
On their way to find Death, the drunk young ruffians run into an old man who looks like death—wrinkled, ragged, pale, and weak. In fact, he's been seeking Death too, but death won't take him no m...