Abstract
In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Pardoner’s dramatically stopping the pilgrimage at an “ale-stake” so that he can drink beer while telling his tale raises questions about his motives and about the relative significance of ale and wine. Ale-stakes, which were decorated poles advertising the availability of ale at alehouses, connect the Pardoner’s choice of performance setting with his friend, the Summoner. Stating that he wants to drink “corny” ale while telling his tale, the Pardoner signals both his intention to retaliate against the Host after his hostile introduction of him into the tale-telling game, and his submerged desire to form a bond with Harry by linking himself with a populist beverage. The Pardoner’s ambivalent response shows both his anger at being alienated from the pilgrimage company and his self-identification with Harry as an equally aggressive individual. Systematically focusing on wine while condemning alcohol during his tale, the Pardoner clearly provokes the Host, whose beverage business relies centrally on wine, even as he signals a subtle alliance with Harry, who openly expressed his desire for malty ale as a cure for his sadness. Aspects of ale, which Pardoner spectacularly links with his tale, underscore his unsettling, existential views: much like medieval ale, which would spoil quickly and so needed to be consumed quickly, humans are temporary creatures caught up in a pleasure-seeking world of consumption. The Pardoner’s death-saturated discourse triggers a violent retaliation by the Host, who rejects the Pardoner’s effort to form a bond based on their shared love of earthy ale.
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Notes
- 1.
Throughout this essay, I refer to the Pardoner using masculine pronouns, primarily because Chaucer refers to the Pardoner this way, but also because my sense of the Pardoner’s competitive friction with Harry strikes me as involving competing masculinities. As discussed below, it is absolutely crucial to note that the Pardoner’s gender and sexuality are readily seen as unstable and open to interpretation, with Dinshaw’s (1989) description of the Pardoner having an “essentially uncertain gender” (175) offering an especially provocative insight into the pilgrim’s peculiar power. For broad analysis of the Pardoner’s gender identity, see Sturges (2000), 21–46. For views presenting opposite ends of a gender spectrum, see Da Costa’s (2017) argument that the Pardoner is a woman “passing” as a man (27), and Green’s (1993) view of the Pardoner as a “womanizer” (145). For analysis of the importance of theorizing medieval trans identities, see Kim and Bychowski (2019), 6–41.
- 2.
All my citations from the Canterbury Tales are from Lawton (2020). All translations and glosses are my own or done in consultation with Lawton’s glosses.
- 3.
I use “beer” and “ale” interchangeably, since this matches the use of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims, whose journey predated the early fifteenth-century introduction of hops into England, which caused producers to begin differentiating beer from ale (see Bennett [1996], 9).
- 4.
As many scholars note, “beel ami,” when spoken is of ambiguous gender in French, since “bel ami” (masculine) and “belle amie” (feminine) would sound the same.
- 5.
- 6.
As scholars often note, Chaucer’s Pardoner is a direct descendant of another con artist who operates under the robes of religion—Faux Semblant [False Seeming], from Jean de Meun’s portion of the Roman de la Rose [Romance of the Rose], which Chaucer himself translated. Chaucer’s pilgrims’ fears of “ribaudye” are a direct echo of the King of Love’s welcoming statement to Faux Semblant that he will be his “rois des ribaus” [king of harlots] (Guillaume 1992; l. 10942; my translation).
- 7.
The ability to preserve wine for an extended time—a quality that is absent in ale of the Pardoner’s era (Bennett 1996, 9; Clark 1983, 31–32)—makes wine the obvious choice here for narrative reasons. However, the multitude of wine references shows that this constraint does not dictate why the Pardoner dwells almost entirely on wine.
- 8.
As Clark (1983) explains, hops were used in continental European brewing from the thirteenth century (31), with hopped beer first being imported into England (in small quantities) around 1400, with the first English brewers being transplanted “Flemings and Dutchmen” who arrived sometime in the fifteenth century (32). Bennett (1996) situates English use of hopped brewing as beginning in the “early fifteenth century” (9).
- 9.
- 10.
For an excellent analysis of how Chaucer’s Pardoner makes use of Innocent III’s text, see Steadman (1964), 125–29.
- 11.
For a seminal reading of this conflict that moves beyond older views that sought to exegetically classify the Pardoner as a spiritual allegory, and instead presents the Pardoner’s effort to destabilize the patriarchal presence represented by the hyper-masculine Host through a dizzying display of the unnerving linguistic possibilities of a “eunuch hermeneutics” (156), see Dinshaw (1989, 156–84).
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Schiff, R. (2022). Alcohol, Community, and Chaucer’s Pardoner: Ale as a Populist Antidote to Alienating Avant-Gardism. In: Geck, J.A., O’Neill, R., Phillips, N. (eds) Beer and Brewing in Medieval Culture and Contemporary Medievalism. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94620-3_13
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