Simile In The Pardoner's Tale

The epic simile following the falls of Troy and Thebes, together with the description of the Punic Wars, likens Custance's suffering to monumental events in Greco-Roman history: but, notably, all of them are decidedly irreligious and focus more pertinently on human suffering rather than divine providence. This is notable as the epic simile is included in the description of Custance bidding farewell to her father, using a variety of epic examples of families being forcibly torn apart by war and duty, and it is telling that the Man of Law does not include any Latin glosses of biblical texts in the same section to emphasise God's power and control over the ensuing events. Instead, there are numerous references to cosmological theories and treatises

Intriguingly, Chaucer references De Miseria explicitly in one other tale in The Canterbury Tales: the 'Pardoner's Prologue.' In the Prologue, the Pardoner references De Miseria (or, Chaucer references De Miseria without intending the Pardoner to have the same specific knowledge, as he often ascertains throughout the narrative) to forcibly condemn avarice and gluttony as vehicles for nature being manipulated into art. Both narrators use Innocent in order to explore themes of their speeches in areas where their personae are most apparent: the Man of Law in his Tale, where he is a constant presence; the Pardoner in his Prologue, which is more of a psychological portrait of himself than a true expostulation on the nature of humanity. Whereas the Man of Law's language centres on the epic and draws multiple allusions to Latin texts, the Pardoner's lexis is persuasive, with Helen Cooper describing him as "a sophisticated and self-conscious verbal artist" . His language throughout both the Prologue and the Tale is made up of contrasts: in the Prologue, his address to his imaginary congregation is overblown and wordy whilst his speech to his fellow pilgrims is dominated by personal pronouns:

Good men and wommen, o thyng warne I yow, If any wight be in this chirche

Even the exemplary nature of the three rioters, who are implicitly likened to the Holy Trinity and are blasphemously noted to subvert the Eucharist by poisoning the bread and wine, ring hollow as the persona outside of the narrative that is most comparable to the three brothers is the Pardoner himself. The Pardoner as narrator has been described as threatening the harmony of the pilgrimage as he, much like the Lollards, can be viewed in retrospect as a pre-cursor to Protestantism, "open[ing] the way to questioning the connections between outward forms and spiritual meaning." Through the Pardoner's narrative impact, Chaucer showcases the true tensions behind the entirety of the Tales, drawing comparable connections between inward, personal and individual worship that becomes a key aspect of Protestantism in the 16th century, and the corruptions of the religious institutions people rely on for spiritual