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The pardoner in Canterbury: class, gender, and urban space in the Prologue to the Tale of Beryn.(Canterbury Tales)(Critical essay)

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From: College Literature
Date: 20060622
Author:Sturges, Robert S.

Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1400 without bringing his pilgrims to the goal of their pilgrimage, the city of Canterbury with its cathedral's relics of St. Thomas a Becket. Within a few decades, however, several anonymous fifteenth-century poets had contributed their own additions to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and one of them provided a vivid comic description of the pilgrims' sightseeing activities after their arrival in Canterbury, most memorably of the Pardoner's misadventures with a tapster, or barmaid, named Kit. This story precedes the inserted, non-Chaucerian Tale of Beryn in ...

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