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Theme Of Corruption In The Pardoner's Tale

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What moves your world? Corruption moved Europe in the Middle Age. “The Pardoner’s Tale” by Geoffrey Chaucer demonstrates the corruption of the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages in an effort to illustrate the irony of paying to get saved which portrays their religious culture during this time.
During the Middle Ages after the black death people feared God was mad at them. Those who did not acknowledge the pope as God’s representative and the Roman Catholic Church as the only true church was doomed. The Catholic Church used this as an advancement to raise money. The church would sell indulgences who would get you saved and less time in purgatory. Clergy were to promise to remain abstinence, but often fathered children. They were to …show more content…

As they sat in a tavern for a drink, they heard the hand-bell clink, before a coffin going to the grave. One of the friends, later on, learned that the person that died was a friend in his old days. Listen, friends, we three are all one in this; let each of us hold up his hand and become the others' brother, and slay this false traitor Death. He shall be slain before the night that slays so many, by God's dignity!" (Chaucer 42-67). These three pledged their word together, each to live and die for the rest as if he were their sworn brother, and up they all started in this drunken fury, and forth they went toward that village of which the tavern-keeper had spoken; and they swore many grisly oaths, and Christ's blessed body they rent to pieces--Death shall be dead if they can catch him(Arnold.) "If you are so glad to find Death, turn up this crooked path; for by my faith I left him in that grove under a tree, and there he will wait, and for all your boasting will he hide. Do you see that oak? There you shall find him. May God, Who redeemed mankind, save you and amend you!" Thus spoke this old creature. And each of these revelers ran until he came to that tree, and there they found nearly eight bushels, as it seemed to them, of florins coined of fine round gold. They no longer sought then after Death, but each was so glad at the sight, for the florins were so beautiful and bright, that they

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