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The role of the Jews in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale extends well beyond the few direct mentions of them. A focus on representations of Jews, both explicit and implicit, in The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale reveals new connections between the Pardoner’s sinfulness, his sexuality, and his relics. The essay begins with analysis of the tale’s allusion to the figure of the Wandering Jew through the figure of the Old Man. I argue for the Wandering Jew as a type of relic and for the encounter between the rioters and the Old Man as an exploration of what Caroline Bynum calls the “dynamic of seen and unseen” that animates medieval Christian materiality. The essay extends this examination of the relationship between anti-Judaism and Christian materiality to the Pardoner’s own “relics,” the prevalent oaths in The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, Chaucer’s depiction of the Pardoner’s body, and, finally, to the bitter concluding exchange between the Host and the Pardoner. Through this analysis, I show how anti-Judaism both permeates and shapes Chaucer depiction of the Pardoner and the Pardoner’s tale.
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Exemplaria
Medieval, Early Modern, Theory
ISSN: 1041-2573 (Print) 1753-3074 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yexm20
Chaucer’s Pardoner and the Jews
Lisa Lampert-Weissig
To cite this article: Lisa Lampert-Weissig (2016) Chaucer’s Pardoner and the Jews, Exemplaria,
28:4, 337-360, DOI: 10.1080/10412573.2016.1219493
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10412573.2016.1219493
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EXEMPLARIA, Vol. 28 No. 4, Winter 2016, 337–360
© 2016 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which
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is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
Chaucer’s Pardoner and the Jews
Lisa Lampert-Weissig
University of California, San Diego, USA
The role of the Jews in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale extends well
beyond the few direct mentions of them. A focus on representations of
Jews, both explicit and implicit, in The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale reveals
new connections between the Pardoner’s sinfulness, his sexuality, and his
relics. The essay begins with analysis of the tale’s allusion to the figure of the
Wandering Jew through the figure of the Old Man. I argue for the Wandering
Jew as a type of relic and for the encounter between the rioters and the Old
Man as an exploration of what Caroline Bynum calls the “dynamic of seen and
unseen” that animates medieval Christian materiality. The essay extends this
examination of the relationship between anti-Judaism and Christian materiality
to the Pardoner’s own “relics,” the prevalent oaths in The Pardoner’s Prologue
and Tale, Chaucer’s depiction of the Pardoner’s body, and, finally, to the bitter
concluding exchange between the Host and the Pardoner. Through this analysis,
I show how anti-Judaism both permeates and shapes Chaucer depiction of the
Pardoner and the Pardoner’s tale.
KEYWORDS  Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, The Pardoner’s Prologue and
Tale, anti-Judaism, relics, Wandering Jew, Christian materiality.
Over the past twenty-five years medievalists have theorized the figure of the Jew in a
wide range of ways. Gilbert Dahan presented the concept of the “theological Jew” in
1990; Jeremy Cohen’s “hermeneutical Jew” followed soon thereafter.
1
Kathleen Biddick’s
“paper Jew” has added further nuance, as have Elisa Narin van Court’s “divided Jew,”
Denise Despres’s “protean Jew,” Sylvia Tomasch’s “virtual Jew,” Steven Kruger’s “spectral
Jew,” and most recently Kathy Lavezzo’s “accommodated Jew.”2 Each of these formula-
tions captures a dierent aspect of a multivalent and shifting representation, but the range
of theorizations is striking in itself. How can we account for it? Heather Blurton and
DOI 10.1080/10412573.2016.1219493
338 LISA LAMPERT-WEISSIG
Hannah Johnson have recently suggested that this “proliferation” is “in part an attempt
to pin down a meaning that keeps slipping away” (48). I would add that the profusion
of theoretical types of “the Jew” also reflects just how much medieval Christians found
Jews “good to think with.”3 Indeed, as I completed Gender and Jewish Dierence from
Paul to Shakespeare, it seemed to me that “the Jew” was something medieval Christians
were almost incapable of thinking without.
The way that medieval Christians used the Jew “to think with” shaped even such
foundational considerations as representations of temporality. Rather than generating
something new to explore the way that the Jew functions in Christian temporalities,
I want to turn instead to something very old: the legend of the Wandering Jew. The
Wandering Jew was said to have insulted Christ on the way to Calvary and was then
doomed by Christ to walk the earth until the Second Coming. The figure’s English name
and his French one, le Juif errant, emphasize his movement through space. In German,
though, he is often called der ewige Jude, the “eternal Jew,” a name that stresses his story’s
temporal dimensions. The Wandering Jew legend, I want to suggest, can yield important
new perspectives on the temporality of “the Jew.” In this essay, I will first explore the
Wandering Jew legend in relation to the complex temporality of relics and then present
a new reading of Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale that is informed by an understanding
of the Wandering Jew himself as relic.
For over a century now, the Wandering Jew has been part of Chaucerians’ quest to
identify the mysterious Old Man in The Pardoner’s Tale. We will begin by accepting the
assertion of the preeminent scholar of the Wandering Jew legend, George Anderson:
Chaucer’s mysterious Old Man would be recognizable to a fourteenth-century English
audience as an allusion to the Wandering Jew legend.4 This allusion links, I will show, to
the other explicit and implicit references to Jews in the Pardoner’s Introduction, Prologue,
and Ta l e , forming a constellation of meaning in which the Jew represents both spiritual
blindness and a sinfulness tied to a debased corporeality, enhancing Chaucer’s portrayal
of these qualities in the Pardoner.
My approach to charting this constellation is still deeply informed by my same convic-
tion that “the Jew” was something medieval Christians could not think without. To try
to explain this pervasive and instrumental presence of the Jew, I concluded Gender and
Jewish Dierence with reference to Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, an examination
of the fundamental role of the “Africanist presence” in U.S. literature, and Morrison’s
work still guides me here. Morrison shows how white American authors have used this
Africanist presence to construct a vision of a normatively white American identity. She
renders her initial moment of realization of this formative construction through a strik-
ing metaphor:
It is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl — the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green
tip, the bolt of white careening back from the gills; the castles at the bottom, surrounded
by pebbles and tiny, intricate fronds of green; the barely disturbed water, the flecks of waste
and food, the tranquil bubbles traveling to the surface — and suddenly I saw the bowl, the
structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the
larger world. (17)
CHAUCER'S PARDONER AND THE JEWS 339
Morrison’s metaphor captures how ideologies can operate in ways that are encompass-
ing yet unseen, as well as the way that our understanding of them can be opened by a
single insightful glimpse. The medieval figure of the Jew was “protean,” to use Despres’s
term, coming to represent a range of ideas, concerns, and qualities, including spiritual
blindness, depravity, materialism, evil, and sinfulness. Scholars’ many formulations of
the Jew are attempts to reveal the fishbowl, to make visible the invisible workings of
ideology. Or, to draw again on Morrison, these theorizations reveal the myriad ways that
“the Jew” functioned in the service of medieval Christian “self-definition,” as we will
see in Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale, in the medieval culture of relics it references, and
in the broader development of Christian materiality of which relic devotion was a part.5
Playing in the Dark has remained significant for my scholarship, however, not only for
its brilliant metaphor of the fishbowl and its insights into how “the Other” can be used to
create a vision of the self, but also for Morrison’s accompanying methodology of reading.
Morrison leads up to her fishbowl image by revealing how, as a reader, she had routinely
underestimated the importance of representation of black people in canonical American
literature, seeing these instances as “decorative — displays of the agile writer’s technical
expertise” (16). When, however, she revisited these texts “[a]s a writer reading,” she “came
to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer” (17). While Morrison’s
method draws from her own experience as an African-American writer, the questions
she asks of texts have, as I have argued before, implications that extend well beyond the
context of U.S. literature. Her work encourages us to question the assumptions that
shape the texts we analyze, as well as the critical approaches we use to analyze them.
Morrison reminds us of the importance of revisiting textual details that might seem
superfluous. Sometimes, however, the significance of such details can be devilishly elu-
sive. I have long wondered why the Pardoner hawks the power of a sheep bone that once
belonged to a “hooly” Jew (VI.351)?6 How does this detail about the bone’s provenance
relate to other references to Jews and Judaism, including the Pardoner’s “glarynge eyes,”
and his reference to the Jews as Christ-killers (I.684)? Further, how do these details relate
to some of the most important critical cruxes in Pardoner’s tale scholarship, especially
the vexed question of the Pardoner’s sexuality? What connections exist between these
elements in the text?
One way to begin to find these connections is through the time-honored practice of
scavenging other scholars’ footnotes. Many of the connections I will examine have long
been latent in the large body of criticism on The Pardoner’s Tale. In his “Claiming The
Pardoner,” an important call to “writ[e] queers (and women and Jews) back into the
Middle Ages,” Steven Kruger has already noted “moments” in which the figure of the Jew
is tied to “bodily corruption.”
7
Glenn Burger has noted parallels between the portrayal of
the Pardoner’s “absolute” alterity and that of Jews in The Prioress’s Tale and Muslims in
The Man of Law’s Tale (1153 n.5). One can also discern the trace of the Jew in Carolyn
Dinshaw’s remark that the “world” of The Pardoner’s Tale “is an Old Testament one,
punitive and unredeemed” (177).
What we need, however, to bring the connections into sharper focus is a kind of turn of
the fish bowl, a “material turn.”8 The Pardoner’s relics have been studied for as long as has
340 LISA LAMPERT-WEISSIG
his Old Man, but these two critical cruxes have not been explicitly considered together in
relation to the culture of relic veneration, nor in relation to the role of the Jew in Christian
materiality. Examining these elements together reveals that Chaucer is not using Jewish
references to “saron” his text; these seemingly “decorative” elements are essential ingre-
dients in what Alastair Minnis has called the tale’s “ethical economy” (Fallible 99).9
In her influential work on “Christian materiality,” Caroline Bynum explores its “com-
plicated dynamic of seen and unseen” alongside how Jews were often seen as “creators
(or, in theological terms, revealers) of holy matter” (“Presence” 23, 10). Acknowledging
this relationship between Christian materiality and Christian anti-Judaism enables us
to re-evaluate the Pardoner’s sham relics and the tale’s plentiful use of oaths, themselves
surprisingly “material,” in relation to the tale’s references to Jews and even in relation
to the Pardoner himself. From the Pardoner’s “glarynge eyen” to his sham Jewish relic,
Chaucer deploys traditional Christian representations of Jews as spiritually dead to
deepen his portrayal of the Pardoner’s depravity. Even the Host’s vituperative attack on
the Pardoner alludes to the Jewish role in Christian materiality through reference to the
story of the finding of the True Cross. Anti-Judaism permeates Chaucer’s portrayal of
the Pardoner, which I read as an exploration of Christian materiality and of the nature
of sin, an exploration that is also at the heart of the legend of the Wandering Jew.
The Wandering Jew as relic and the Old Man
The Old Man in The Pardoner’s Tale has been interpreted variously as a personification
of Death, a representation of vetus homo, of Old Age, and as the Wandering Jew.10 None
of these interpretations precludes the others and, indeed, I have given up (for now at
least) on attempting to solve definitively the mystery of the Old Man’s identity. In any
case, it seems clear that a fourteenth-century English audience could and would have
recognized in the Old Man an allusion to the Wandering Jew legend (Anderson 31–32).
This allusion corresponds with the legend’s temporal dimensions, as the Old Man also
endlessly waits, in this case for death.
Who is the Wandering Jew? According to legend, this Jew taunted Christ at the time of
the Passion. Some sources depict the encounter between the Jew and Christ as occurring
in Pilate’s court. Others describe it as happening on the Via Dolorosa, as Christ paused
before the Jew’s home and the Jew refused him rest. In each setting, the Jew cruelly tells
Jesus to hurry on to his death. Jesus responds that he will go, but that the Jew must
remain until he returns. The Jew is then fated to await Christ’s return. Converted by his
experience, he will tell anyone who asks the story of the Passion. While the Wandering
Jew clearly signifies the Jewish people, seen by medieval Christians as doomed to wander
because of their rejection of Christ, the Wandering Jew is also, I want to argue, a type
of relic. The legend depicts him as a living, breathing remnant from the time of Christ,
a material witness who can give eyewitness testimony about the Passion.11 Transformed
through his encounter with Christ, he becomes, according to the most important medieval
written account of the legend, Matthew of Paris’s thirteenth-century Chronica Majora,
“one of the wonders of the world and a great proof of the Christian faith.”12
CHAUCER'S PARDONER AND THE JEWS 341
Studies of the Wandering Jew legend tend to treat Matthew Paris’s Chronica account
as a brief, albeit influential, marker on a very long road. Critics working on the legend’s
entire transmission history cannot aord to spend much time charting the lay of the land.
If one does pause, however, to survey the rest of Matthew’s Chronica, one finds that land-
scape veritably littered with relics. The Wandering Jew becomes one relic among many,
another commodity from the East, brought through the storytelling of visiting Armenian
bishops. Like the most important contact relics, the Wandering Jew has actually had
physical contact with Christ.13 As with the True Cross, or with the Crown of Thorns,
the Wandering Jew was an instrument of suering, but through his conversion he has
become a Christian sign. In Matthew’s second entry on the Wandering Jew, for 1252, he
notes that the visiting Armenian bishops come from the site of yet another significant
relic, Noah’s ark, also a material sign of divine punishment and divine grace (5.340–41).
The Wandering Jew’s connection to relics is emphasized not only through the details
of his story, but also through Matthew’s accompanying illustration of the Wanderer,
believed to be drawn with his own hand (see Figure 1). In it the Wandering Jew, named
Cartaphilus, encounters Christ on the Via Dolorosa, not in Pilate’s court as described in
the body of the text. An agile, almost balletic Christ turns backwards to face a hunched,
older man with banners providing their dialogue.
14
Suzanne Lewis notes how Matthew’s
“emendations tend to interpret the encounter between Christ and Cartaphilus as the
ineluctable unfolding of a predetermined sequence of events … infusing the legend with
the gravity and ongoing ecacy of a scriptural text” (303). I would add that this tem-
poral dynamic also reflects the sense of prophetic momentum that underlies belief in
Christian supersession, a triumph over Judaism that leaves Judaism held in abeyance,
awaiting redemption and release.
F
igure
1Image of the Wandering Jew, created by Matthew Paris in the Chronica Majora Part II, from
MS Corpus Christi College Cambridge 16, fol. 74v. Reprinted with permission from the Master
and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
342 LISA LAMPERT-WEISSIG
In the body of Matthew’s text, and that of his source, Roger of Wendover’s Flores
Historiarum, Cartaphilus is not specified as Jewish. Lewis and others have pointed to
Matthew’s accompanying illustration to make this association, not only through the
Wanderer’s bulbous nose, sometimes a feature of Jewish caricature, but also through
his mattock, long associated with Cain and through Cain with the Jews.15 The angle of
the Wanderer’s tool, with the heavy metal end dipping toward the ground, makes this
figure look less energetic than Christ; he is older and fading. The implement’s drooping
slant creates a visual echo of the fallen or broken lance of allegorical representations of
the Synagogue as well as a contrast to the cross, which is carried upright, even jauntily
by Christ. The mattock represents the sin that Cartaphilus must eternally drag about
with him; the cross appears to be practically borne aloft.
By drawing the Wanderer as older and lagging, Matthew not only visually reinforces
the temporal dynamic of the pair’s dialogue, but also taps into traditional representations
of Jews and Judaism as old, tired, and defeated, their spiritual truth both fulfilled and
superseded by Christianity and Christians. Cartaphilus’ garb, however, adds a paradox-
ical twist to this depiction. Lewis describes the Wanderer’s attire as that of a peasant
(303), but his broad-brimmed hat recalls those associated with pilgrims. His mattock thus
also seems like a perversion of the traditional pilgrim’s sta, its iron end causing him to
lag rather than helping him forward. The Wanderer’s pilgrimage is hindered by his sin,
which is linked to the first act of human violence and to the momentous act of violence
allegedly perpetrated by the Jews against Christ. The Wanderer lingers in a strange
liminal state, caught between Jewish and Christian identities. His encounter converts
him, but he is still always — eternally, as the German name for him emphasizes — a Jew.
He is forever trapped in what Steven Kruger calls the “and yet and yet and yet” stage of
conversion (“Times” 24). His state reflects how medieval Christians typically regarded
their Jewish contemporaries: he exists in a state of suspended spiritual animation. From
the perspective of his own journey, however, he is a kind of pilgrim, wandering endlessly
as he awaits a repetition of the moment when he encountered the Savior, as well as
awaiting a chance for redemption. His entire existence becomes the penitent journey of
the pilgrim, even while he serves as a contact relic of Christ to those who encounter him.
The temporality of the Chronica image is further complicated by Matthew’s visualiza-
tion of the Cross carried by Christ. Suzanne Lewis argues that it resembles a processional
cross and that this detail makes “the instrument of the Passion … traverse time and space
from the Crucifixion in Jerusalem to the medieval present in a visible reflection of the leg-
end’s central temporal juxtapositions” (303). In creating this visual link between the Cross
borne by Christ and the processional crosses borne in rituals throughout Christendom,
Matthew reinforces the dynamic temporality of the relic which, as a material remainder
of a past event, brings that sacred past into the present.
The Cross’s dark green echoes other illustrations of the Cross in the Chronica, creating
a nexus of visual connections among the important relics of Christ featured in the text
(MS Corpus Christi College Cambridge 16, fol. 74v).16 Matthew provides detailed and
illustrated accounts of King Louis IX’s acquisition and installations of the relics of the
True Cross and the Crown of Thorns at Paris. These entries tie into the Chronica account
CHAUCER'S PARDONER AND THE JEWS 343
of Henry III’s elaborate installation of a relic of the Holy Blood at Westminster in 1247,
an event which King Henry himself asked Matthew to witness and record (4.641–44).
The prominence and importance of relics in the Chronica inject an enduring and numi-
nous Christian materiality into the great flow of events recorded in Matthew’s expansive
chronicle.
The Wandering Jew is a fitting figure for a work with the Chronica’s scope, ambi-
tions, and apocalyptic preoccupations. As a living embodiment of Christian history,
the Wandering Jew’s constant anticipation of the End-times keeps the longed-for (and
feared) end of that history in sight. The Wandering Jew’s unique and uncanny state
makes him not only a reminder of human sinfulness in general, and purported Jewish
crimes in particular, but also a model for hope and redemption. He continually cycles
between the ages of thirty and one hundred, a pattern that invokes the Christian promise
of resurrection. Thirty was posited as the ideal age at which the bodies of the righteous
would be resurrected in glory at the End of Days (Bynum, Resurrection 98).
By staying in his own changeable body, the Wandering Jew is like and unlike a relic of
a saint. Saints’ bodies transcend decay and achieve a state akin to that of the resurrected
body before the End-times. The Wandering Jew has attained a state of immortality, but is
cursed to remain part of a world of sin and decay. At the time of Christ, the Wandering
Jew stood in the presence of the divine but could not recognize it, instead choosing to
malign and attack. As a result of this inability to see the truth, he must live in the memory
of that shameful moment until the end of time. The Wandering Jew is a reminder and
a sign, not of holiness, but of a sinfulness that can only be redeemed through suering
and only by those who can interpret and understand the truth correctly.
Seeing and (not) believing
Failure to interpret signs correctly, an inability to understand the world as a Christian,
forms the core of The Pardoner’s Tale. “Radix malorum est Cupiditas” describes a sin
that stems from a fundamental misinterpretation of values: an inability to value the
immaterial over the material (VI.334).17 And because the young rioters cannot discern
the truth in the signs around them, because they are mired in the literal and subject to
greed, their encounter with the Old Man leads them to their deaths.
This encounter occurs very soon after the rioters leave the tavern: “Whan they han
goon nat fully half a mile” (VI.711). The Old Man greets the rioters first: “This olde man
ful mekely hem grette, / And seyde thus, ‘Now, lordes, God yow see!’” (VI.714–15). This
opening salutation is, on one level, a blessing — “may God see you” — but these words
also sound a warning note. Believers know that God can, of course, see this meeting
between reckless youth and warning age; these young men, however, are oblivious to
God’s presence in the world. The rioters can only perceive what stands directly before
them: a strange old man. Blinded by arrogance, the rioters respect nothing and respond
to the Old Man’s greeting with impertinent questions: “‘Why artow al forwrapped save
thy face? / Why lyvestow so longe in so greet age?’” (VI.718–19). Before the old man
explains his cursed state, he peers squarely at his interlocutor: “This olde man gan looke
344 LISA LAMPERT-WEISSIG
in his visage” (VI.720). The Old Man recognizes the importance of vision, but the young
rioters are blind to the true meaning of the signs before their eyes. Their encounter
engages a metaphor of spiritual understanding as a type of vision that had already for
centuries been associated with a representation of the Jews as blind to Christian truth.18
The pervasive charge that Jews are stubbornly, even inexplicably, resistant to seeing
and hearing Christian truth has roots in interpretations of 2 Corinthians 3.15–18, which
depicts Jewish understanding as veiled. The Old Man is wrapped everywhere except for
his face, a configuration that makes him like those who Paul says behold “the glory of the
Lord with open face.” These wrappings invert traditional visualizations of the allegorical
figure of Synagoga, whose blindness, often represented by a blindfold, contrasts to the
clear vision of her upright counterpart, Ecclesia.19 As a Jew converted, the Wandering
Jew finally gains true vision.
Other points in the tradition of representing Jewish blindness include Augustine’s
image of the Jew as a blind man looking in a mirror or his critique of Jewish perception
as seeing with the eyes of the flesh, as opposed to seeing, as a Christian, with the eyes of
the heart: “It is no great thing to see Christ with the eyes of the flesh, but it is great to
believe in Christ with the eyes of the heart.”20 The Wandering Jew legend encompasses
this posited dichotomy between Jewish and Christian perception. If we look through an
Augustinian lens, we see that when the Wandering Jew first rejects Christ it is because he
sees with the eyes of the flesh and cannot perceive Christ’s holiness. After his conversion,
the Wandering Jew can see with the eyes of the heart and becomes the eternally living,
eternally witnessing figure of the legend.
The rioters are not Jews, but they act like Jews as represented in the Christian tradition.
They exhibit literal-minded, stubborn, and greedy behavior at every turn. Deaf and blind
as the Jews in Peter the Venerable’s infamous charge against Jewish spiritual handicap,
the rioters continually seek literal rewards when they should be seeking spiritual ones.21
The rioters were deaf to the tacit warning of the knave in the tavern when he shared with
them his mother’s admonishment. To those who can interpret through the spirit, the boy’s
words are obviously a caution always to be ready to meet God’s judgment. The rioters,
though, can only understand the boy’s words literally and make ready for physical combat
with a “privee theef men clepeth Deeth” (VI.675). Like the rioters — and the Wandering
Jew — the Old Man appears at one time to have been unable to read the signs. He seems
to have sinned in the past, only then to become a (misunderstood) sign of sin himself.
In this way the Old Man, as a version of the Wandering Jew, is both a warning to the
rioters and a mirror to their behavior. The Wandering Jew saw Christ with his own eyes
and heard him with his own ears, but could only respond with arrogance and, in some
versions, even with violence: he is sometimes depicted as not only insulting, but striking
Christ. The rioters, in refusing to heed the Old Man’s warning, follow in the footsteps
of the Wandering Jew. Had the young men chosen to inquire how the Old Man came to
exist in such a unique state, they might have listened and properly understood and been
saved both physically and spiritually.
This characterization of the rioters as unable to recognize spiritual truth can also be
applied to the Pardoner himself, but his depravity seems even deeper than that of the
CHAUCER'S PARDONER AND THE JEWS 345
men he describes. Chaucer depicts the Pardoner as willfully refusing to follow Christian
teachings. The Pardoner appears to know what death and eternal damnation are and
nevertheless rushes head on to meet them, duping others into following. He uses physical
objects to foster this sinfulness, in the hope that it will lead to his own material gain even
if the souls of those he ensnares “goon a-blakeberyed” (VI.406). The most important
of his physical lures are the Pardoner’s false “relikes,” including his “pigges bones,” a
pillowcase passed o as Our Lady’s veil, and his shoulder bone of a “hooly Jewes sheep”
(I.700, VI.351). He relies on misrecognition of the sanctity of these “relics” to swindle
gullible believers. These material props in the Pardoner’s spiritual charade underscore the
tension between the material and the spiritual that runs through relic discourse itself and
also reveal a point of intersection between relic discourse and anti-Jewish representation.
Relics, relic discourse and anti-Judaism
The term “relic discourse” comes from Robyn Malo, who defines it as “the technical
terminology, together with the metaphors and commonplaces, that writers in the later
Middle Ages drew upon to construct the meaning of relics” (Relics 5). These meta-
phors and commonplaces intersect with anti-Jewish discourses in The Pardoner’s Tale
and beyond. Although Malo does not remark upon it, her analysis of relic discourse in
medieval English texts, including The Pardoner’s Tale, often focuses on texts that are
also significant to medieval anti-Jewish discourse, such as Thomas of Monmouth’s Life
and Passion of William of Norwich, the first ritual murder accusation narrative, and
the narratives of the Grail.22
It is not simply that relic discourse and anti-Jewish discourse share key texts; they also
share a fundamental vision of the relationships between the material world and the truth
hidden in that world. We can recognize this dynamic through the mandating, from the
early thirteenth century, that relics be displayed not “naked,” but in reliquaries (Bynum,
“Presence” 23). As Malo observes: “The interplay between inside and outside … shares
a lot in common with the concerns of relic discourse, including the preoccupation with
whether outward artifice (or a spectacular shrine) resembles inward intention (or, say,
rotting saints’ bones)” (Relics 127). The practice of enshrining the relic in a reliquary
calls upon a Christian to discern the sacred relationship between the reliquary’s daz-
zling material exterior and the humble but truly precious and incorruptible holy matter
within. Christian tradition represents Jews as unable to interpret properly sacred texts
and those signs of the sacred that are present in the world more generally. Proper viewing
of relics requires exactly the kind of Christian discernment of inner truth that the Jews
are said to lack.
These intersections between “relic discourse” and Christian discourse about the Jews
demonstrate a fundamental role that the Jew plays in Christian theology, spirituality, and
cultural production, including relic discourse. In her discussion of Christian relics, Ora
Limor has noted the repeated portrayal of “the Jew as the preserver and revealer of the
Christian truth, or, in other words, the relationship of the Jewish authority to the things
sacred to Christianity” (63). Caroline Bynum and Mitchell Merback have shown how
346 LISA LAMPERT-WEISSIG
representations of Jews and Judaism (as well as the fates of actual Jewish communities)
were central to the creation of relic shrines and to relic veneration in the later Middle
Ages.23 While their studies focus primarily on German-speaking regions, representations
of Jews as agents of violence against Christians and the further association of Jews with
materiality and physicality were part of cultural discourses in late medieval England as
well, even in the absence of a Jewish community. In a world in which literal bits and pieces
of people can endure and signify and where only a thin veil separates the living and the
dead, Jews and Jewish bodies, real or imagined, figured continually into representations
of forms of Christian materiality, including relics.24
The Jews have been portrayed throughout the Christian tradition as blind to the truth
of Christ that played out before their very eyes. Tales of host desecration, in which the
Jews are seen as torturing and as testing the holiest of holy matter, also engage in a
very material “tug of war over truth and vision, matter and spirit, knowledge and faith”
(Lipton 199). The Wandering Jew, who rejected the suering Jesus who stood before him,
keeps with this tradition, his sin and his witness acting as (eternally) living proof of the
truth of Christian faith, a living relic. And the most sacred contact relics of Christ, such
as the Crown of Thorns and the Holy Cross, are material remains of the creation of holy
matter intimately associated with Jewish perfidy. As a type of contact relic, the Wandering
Jew is part of a tradition of figuring the Jews as the originators of the perverse method
of revealing the sacred through desecration.
Creating perverse relationships between the sacred and the profane is at the very center
of the Pardoner’s enterprise. His “relics,” foul rags and bones passed o as holy objects,
exemplify the corruption at the heart of his dealings. If the Pardoner demonstrates, as
Dinshaw argues, the “inadequacy of the very categories —masculine/feminine, letter/
spirit, literal/figurative,” he also demonstrates the inadequacy of easy dierentiation
between Christians and Jews — as in the failings of the rioters (160). And yet while “easy
passage” between these categories may be “confounded,” to borrow from Dinshaw’s
formulations about the Pardoner, I would argue that it is nevertheless so much a part
of how Christian thought is constructed (these categories are so “good to think with”)
that they are worth considering in Chaucer’s depiction of the Pardoner’s relics (160). In
relic discourse the Jews are themselves “confounding”; they are figured simultaneously
as authenticators and deniers of Christian truth.
The General Prologue has already exposed the Pardoner’s sham relics by the time he
presents his shoulder bone from “an hooly Jewes sheep” (VI.351). When laved in a well,
he claims, this relic will cure the ailments of livestock. Like the stone-studded cross that
the Pardoner is described as carrying in The General Prologue, the bone is encased in
“latoun,” a coating of brass gilding the ancient animal remains much as how a reliquary
would enshrine an actual relic (I.699, VI.350). This shoulder bone is not a Christian relic,
but a supposedly Jewish one dating from the time before Christ.25 This Jewish origin
could be read as an exoticism meant to add spice to the Pardoner’s deceptive scheme, thus
viewing the reference to Jews as “decorative,” to harken back to Morrison’s discussion in
Playing in the Dark. Such a reading, however, obscures a glimpse of the confounding role
of the Jew in the relic discourse in which the character of the Pardoner is immersed. The
CHAUCER'S PARDONER AND THE JEWS 347
Pardoner’s use of a “Jewish” relic to swindle the unwitting reveals the Jewish element in
how medieval Christians understood the relationship between materiality and Christian
belief that relics embody: Jews function as signs of unbelief, and as revealers of the holy.
The Pardoner’s claims for the shoulder-bone relic emphasize not a spiritual power, but
a material one, exploiting a connection between Jews and magic that goes along with
the persistent association of the Jews with a debased carnality and materiality.26 This
Jewish relic comes not from a human saint, but from a sheep. Indeed, this object has
power because it was once possessed by a holy Jew, himself a kind of ossified remnant
of a superseded Jewish faith. Like the Wandering Jew, the holy Jew himself is an object.
The bone is a relic of a relic that can be used for ends mired in the “debased physical
world,” such as curing livestock and increasing wealth (Kruger 22).27
With his depiction of the Pardoner, Chaucer explores how Christian materiality can
be exploited if Christians lack the ability to judge what is false and what is true. An
ability to discern the truth is, after all, precisely what this relic can destroy. The Pardoner
claims that the shoulder bone holds a cure for the jealous husband, blinding him to a
wife’s infidelity even if she has “taken prestes two or thre” (VI.371). The fate of a hus-
band treated with this holy well water resembles that of January in The Merchant’s Tale
(Jordan 28). January’s figurative blindness, we might recall, becomes literal. He has been
blind to the true meaning of marriage and to the desires of his wife and is then blind
to the adulterous act he views. His blindness resembles the spiritual blindness explored
metaphorically in The Pardoner’s Tale, linked, through this ancient ovine relic, to the
Jews. The Pardoner’s Tale is one part of a constellation of references in The Canterbury
Tales in which metaphors of sight and belief intersect with a range of medieval Christian
discourses about the Jews.
How the Pardoner’s sheep-bone relic works — by being laved in a well — may call to
mind the biblical figure of Jacob, long associated with a well, adding to the suggestive
resonance of the relic, as well as associations with numerous wells tied to figures such
as David, Job, and Miriam in the holy land. Homegrown English superstitions around
wells and their potentially magical or healing properties may also intersect here with
an association between Jews and magic that dates back to antiquity. And yet, I suspect
that a rather sinister joke lurks in this description. That the Jews were believed to have
caused the pestilence through well-poisoning adds another ironically malignant dimen-
sion to the Pardoner’s sham relics.28 He recommends that the holy Jew’s relic be dipped
in a well in order to unleash its healing eects on the diseases of livestock. These ills —
“pokkes,” scabs, and sores — evoke symptoms of plague in humans (VI.358). Given the
shadow of plague in The Pardoner’s Tale and the accusation of Jewish well-poisoning
that accompanied the Black Death, a sheep’s bone with a Jewish source, even a holy one,
might well be the last thing a prudent Christian would want to dip into his well. The
Pardoner attempts to entice by claiming for this Jewish sheep’s bone relic the power to
increase wealth, an enticement that could perhaps lead the greedy taker to a fate eerily
resembling that of the three rioters.
348 LISA LAMPERT-WEISSIG
The materiality of oaths
This Jewish relic, like the rest of the Pardoner’s stock, is a fake, its falseness perversely
highlighted by a pervasive swearing on the most revered relics in Christendom. The
Pardoner’s tale is blown in on a hot wind of oaths that does not abate until the kiss of
reconciliation between the Pardoner and the Host. The opening gust accompanies the
Host’s emotional response to the previous tale, told by the Physician:
Oure Hooste gan to swere as he were wood;
“Harrow!” quod he, “by nayles and by blood!
This was a fals cherl and a fals justise.” (VI.287–89)
The Host continues this lament over Virginia’s death by swearing on “corpus bones,” and
on a “Seint Ronyan” whose identity has long been debated by scholars (VI.314, 310).29
These oaths and all those that follow allow Christian materiality to permeate not only
the imagery surrounding the Pardoner, but the very language used to create him. Oaths
transform the verbal into the material.
The Pardoner responds to the Host’s opening volley of oaths by preaching that
“[g]ret sweryng is a thyng abhominable” (VI.631). He reasons that swearing is even more
transgressive than murder itself since the commandment against it precedes that against
homicide: “Lo, rather he forbedeth swich sweryng / Than homycide or many a cursed
thyng” (VI.643–44). This comparison between swearing and murder calls attention to
the physicality of oaths; they have power that extends into the material world and that
can inflict violence upon it.
Having thus set up swearing as the worst kind of sin, the Pardoner then perversely
engages in it:30
“By Goddes precious herte,” and “By his nayles,”
And “By the blood of Crist that is in Hayles,
Sevene is my chaunce, and thyn is cynk and treye!”
“By Goddes armes, if thou falsly pleye,
This daggere shal thurghout thyn herte go!”;
This fruyt cometh of the bicched bones two,
Forsweryng, ire, falsnesse, homycide.
Now, for the love of Crist, that for us dyde,
Lete youre othes, bothe grete and smale. (VI.651–59)
The Pardoner’s choice to swear on the Holy Blood at Hailes is an interesting one. This
controversial blood relic was believed only to be visible to the penitent, a claim reminis-
cent of the Pardoner’s own methods of manipulation as he cleverly discourages those
who have sinned grievously or cuckolded their spouses from making oerings.
31
Both the
Pardoner and the Hailes relic operate at the outer boundaries of faith. If a “ful vicious
man” can work good, is the Hailes relic potent though false (VI.459)? False relics con-
found the intimate relationship between the material and the spiritual and foreground
questions concerning the “entente” of those who believe and those who would manip-
ulate this belief.
CHAUCER'S PARDONER AND THE JEWS 349
The Pardoner’s sermon within a sermon against vices such as swearing concludes
with the grotesque rattle of the “bicched bones,” conjuring an image of the body just
before the arrival of a corpse begins the action of his tale (VI.656). The three rioters are
in their cups early in the morning when they hear a bell announcing “a cors … caried
to his grave” and they inquire into the corpse’s identity (VI.665). This dead body eerily
connects to other uncanny materialities in the tale to create its otherworldly atmosphere.
The evocation of a “privee theef men clepeth Deeth,” the mysterious Old Man, and even
the ominous oak tree use grisly corporeality to tie the sin of avarice to the sullied flesh
of human beings and to the material instruments through which they attempt to fulfill
fleshly desire (VI.675).
Against this backdrop of mortal bodies whose flesh is all too vulnerable to sin and
decay stands the paradox of God made flesh. Christ is pure, but when he took on the
body of man, he took on the vulnerability of the body. His sacrifice bought human
redemption. Yet in the world of the tavern, in all of its sinful indecency, Christ’s body is
tortured again through the rioters’ oaths. This re-torturing of Christ creates a temporal
paradox; as Christ suers once again, he is thrust back to his time on earth, suering
this time not for human salvation, but, in the case of a gambler swearing on his dice,
for the sake of filthy lucre.
The quotidian sin of swearing was typically associated with the very types of dissolute
young men that Chaucer depicts in The Pardoner’s Tale and the sins of the tavern that
the Pardoner describes, indulges in, and hypocritically attacks (Gill 149). The curses
the young men hurl throughout the tale are strong and violent, they swear by “Goddes
armes!” (VI.692), “Goddes digne bones!” (VI.695), “By Goddes dignitee” (VI.701), “By
Goddes precious dignitee” (VI.782), “by Seint John!” (VI.752), and “By God and by the
hooly sacrement!” (VI.757). The Pardoner comments as he discusses their pledge to slay
Death that “many a grisly ooth thanne han they sworn, / And Cristes blessed body they
torente” (708–9), thus linking the rioters to those who tormented and murdered Christ.
The Pardoner has already explicitly linked these violent oaths and the originary vio-
lence they conjure to the Jew as Christ-killer:
Hir othes been so grete and so dampnable
That it is grisly for to heere hem swere.
Oure blissed Lordes body they totere —
Hem thoughte that Jewes rente hym noght ynough. (VI.472–75)
The Pardoner here also invokes the “Warning to Swearers” tradition, in which the Jews
are both the ultimate perpetrators of sinful violence and the model for all future sinners.32
When Christ walked among us, this logic of belief dictates, the Jews did him violent
injury. All subsequent sinners continue this pattern of oense, sinning against Christ
despite the fact that he has sacrificed himself for them.33
Chaucer’s Parson also invokes the “Warning to Swearers” tradition and we can find it
as well in other texts.34 In Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne, in an exemplum known
as the “Bleeding Child,” the Virgin appears to a man who continually swears bearing a
brutally torn infant Jesus in her arms. She informs the oath maker that he is responsible
350 LISA LAMPERT-WEISSIG
for this brutality, likening him to the Jews and proclaiming that his wickedness exceeds
even theirs: “þyn oþys done hym more greuesnesse / þan alle the Iweys wykkednesse.
/ Þey pyned hym onys, & passed a-way, / But þou, pynest hym euery day” (719–22).35
Here, the sin of swearing is even more grievous than Jewish violence against Christ; their
action occurred only once, but swearing occurs every day.
As Anthony Bale argues in his analysis of the “Warning to Swearers” tradition, in such
representations of the violence of this type of sin “the Passion goes on anew, ‘ever redy’,
repeated, redone, in the everyday curses and games of late medieval English people” (59).
In discussing an example of the Warning to Swearers tradition found in Broughton, Bale
notes that men depicted playing dice in the painting are garbed in particolored clothing,
which could be viewed as “symbolic of the Jews at the Passion” (59). Gill has argued
that this form of polemic against swearing “relies on a prior familiarity with Passion
images and an awareness of the sort of pious responses they are intended to prompt”
(148). Imbricated in this devotion to the Passion is the depiction of the Jews as cruel
tormentors.36 Christians are to remember in patience, faith, and fear the violence wrought
by the disbelieving Jews and to avoid imitating it. The violent oaths sworn by the rioters
make them “assistant torturers” at the Passion, but we are never meant to forget which
masters they assist (Miller and Bosse 179). The Jews were never the only actors against
Christ at the Passion, nor were they involved in every subsequent Christian martyrdom,
and yet, just as imitatio Christi came to stand as the model for all subsequent Christian
suering, so too did the Jews become the quintessential perpetrators of anti-Christian
violence.37 If men like the rioters swear every day, the violence of the Jews at the Passion
is re-invoked every day as well.
In this way, the rioters’ blasphemous oaths both shape and bend expectations and
experiences of the material world. If an oath sworn on Christ’s body can re-enact the
Crucifixion, then it bends time, collapsing the sacred past to the profane present in the
same way that the consecrating words of the Mass generate the Real Presence.
38
Through
this swearing on holy matter, the verbal becomes material and curses act like physical
blows. These oaths possess a distinctly material reality that stands in sharp contrast to
that of the Pardoner’s “pigges bones,” literal pieces of matter with a signification that
is empty at best and damning at worst.
Chaucer’s depictions of the Pardoner’s Jewish relic and of the Pardoner’s invocation
of the Jew as Christ-killer deepen his portrayals both of the rioters’ depravity and of
the Pardoner’s. These references resonate with other anti-Jewish representation in The
Canterbury Tales. Not only figured as tormentors of the body of God, the Jews are also
tied to carnality and to the body itself, specifically to a body figured as disgusting.39
Kruger, Cuel, and Resnick have explored the “rhetoric of disgust” in medieval inter-
faith polemic and found in medieval Christian writings figurations of Jewish bodies as
diseased, deformed, and linked to a feminizing bloody flux. These beliefs lingered well
into the early modern period and beyond. We can find traces of them in The Pardoner’s
Prologue and Ta le that link to other parts of The Canterbury Tales as well. The Pardoner’s
description of the glutton’s throat as a privy — “That of his throte he maketh his pryvee”
(VI.527) — with its vivid evocation of the way that food and drink pass through the
CHAUCER'S PARDONER AND THE JEWS 351
glutton’s body echoes a central image from The Prioress’s Tale. There the Jews have a little
Christian boy thrown into a privy with his throat slashed after having travelled through
a Jewish quarter as “free and open at eyther ende” as the disgusting body of the glutton
(VII.494). The ultimate physical permeability manifests itself through bodies of the Jews
torn apart in punishment at the end of The Prioress’s Tale, their severed flesh contrasting
starkly with the jewel-like body of the boy they murdered, his body evoking Christ’s. The
Jews in The Prioress’s Tale are aligned with the filth excreted through the orifices of the
human body, an association that is a mainstay of medieval Christian representation of
Jews and that links to the Pardoner’s words and to his ambiguous and repellent person.
The Pardoner
What of the Pardoner himself? Like the Old Man in his tale, the Pardoner has been
subject to much critical speculation concerning his identity. Is the Pardoner a type of
eunuch, a hermaphrodite, a homosexual? As with the Old Man, pinning down a definitive
identity for the Pardoner seems futile; the proliferation of “Pardoners” could be seen
as comparable to the theoretical proliferation of types of “the Jew.” And, indeed, the
complex and multivalent nature of the Pardoner is precisely why he is still such a signif-
icant literary character. But while the answers concerning the Pardoner are elusive, the
questions are important. Steven Kruger’s directive seems most instructive here: “we need
to show how the Pardoner’s challenge to medieval heterosexist notions of signification
— and Chaucer’s anxiety about that challenge — lays bare the constructed nature of
those notions” (138). Laying bare these constructions is, to return to Morrison, trying
to recognize the contours of the fishbowl. Consideration of how dierent members of
Chaucer’s original audience might have understood the Pardoner and his tale can oer
insights into a tradition that continues to have cultural force. In trying to assess the “scale”
of the Pardoner’s risk of eternal damnation we need to see how the Pardoner’s sexuality
and his spirituality, both material and immaterial, come together.40
These elements conjoin in Chaucer’s depiction of the Pardoner’s body. We are told
of the Pardoner that “[s]wiche glarynge eyen hadde he as an hare” (I.684), a compar-
ison usually, and rightly, I believe, taken as evidence of indulgence in sins of the flesh,
including gluttony and lechery.41 Critics, drawing on Boswell’s careful examination of
both Christian and pre-Christian sources, have shown that the hare was associated with
hermaphrodism, sodomy, and pederasty. These associations are compounded with the
other animals to which the Pardoner is compared: goats, geldings, and mares all point
to “sexual deviancy.”42
But the metaphor of the hare in The General Prologue is, we must remember, specifi-
cally linked to the eyes, a feature of the hare that medieval Christians used as yet another
way to figure Jewish blindness.
43
Hugh of St. Cher reads the hare’s reputedly poor vision
as representing the weakness that the Jews are said to have in their understanding of
scriptural truth. Schweitzer has traced a connection between the glosses on the prohi-
bition against eating the hare in Leviticus and what is said of the Jews in the Glossa
Ordinaria — “ruminant Judaei verba legis, sed … in Patrem et Filium non credunt, nec
352 LISA LAMPERT-WEISSIG
duo testamenta recipiunt.”44 That hares were commonly believed to sleep with their
eyes open was also tied to the long association between Jews and spiritual blindness. As
Schweitzer eloquently puts it: “Eyes ‘glarynge’ like a hare’s may therefore be the unsee-
ing eyes of a soul spiritually asleep, shining in the darkness of the privation of grace”
(25). Kruger points out that interpretive blindness was associated with homosexuality
as well, as a type of sexual barrenness (Kruger, “Claiming” 127). These associations are
not competing, but rather function synergistically.
We find a striking example of the representation of the hare functioning multivalently
in the Summer volume of the Breviary of Renaud (ca. 1302–1305; see Figure 2). Without
attempting to provide a definitive reading of this image, I want to call attention to its
emphasis on vision. The hare, his own eyes “glarynge” in a fashion consistent with typ-
ical medieval iconography of this animal, makes contact with the eyes of a recumbent
man with hands held in prayer. The contrast between the hare’s eyes and the man’s
suggests a focus on spiritual sight, although which figure, if either, can truly see is open
to interpretation. The line of chant above the image, “si tu sustulisti eum,” is from John
20.15, in which Mary Magdalene has mistaken Christ for a gardener.
45
Issues of spiritual
recognition are clearly at play here, and the hare, associated with the Jewish lack of
spiritual recognition, is the animal chosen for this representation.
Just a few leaves later (fol. 101
r
; see Figure 3), we find an image in which the hare retains
his staring eyes, but his hands engage in playing a tune on a bagpipe. The other figure,
Figure 2Breviary of Renaud de Bar, Verdun, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 107, fol. 96v. Reprinted
with permission from the Bibliothèque municipale, Verdun.
CHAUCER'S PARDONER AND THE JEWS 353
whose posterior that takes the form of a bear’s head, its snout agape in the hare’s direc-
tion, creates a scene that Jean-Claude Schmitt reads as a clear evocation of a homosexual
relationship (346). The Breviary provides, then, a good example of multivalent meaning
for the hare that encompasses association with sins of both body and soul.
The hare evokes sins of lechery and the sin of spiritual blindness simultaneously,
demonstrating what Debra Strickland, in her study of the role of anti-Judaism in medi-
eval bestiaries, has called “the contemporary Christian interest in constructing chains
of sin” (210). Chaucer wraps his Pardoner so securely in such chains that he creates, as
Pearsall beautifully puts it, a “sense of menace, of some stirring of unspeakable evil, the
sense of death, … too strong and too universally apprehended to allow any easy fitting
of the Pardoner to a literary scheme” (360). In Donald Howard’s words, the Pardoner
is “a mystery, an enigma — sexually anomalous, hermaphroditic, menacing, contradic-
tory” (344–45).46 For all of this complexity, however, the Pardoner may be a kind of zero
sum of his parts. Pearsall has argued that with the Pardoner, “Chaucer is not so much
writing unpsychologically as creating zero-psychology” (361). He writes perceptively
of the Pardoner as a kind of automaton, someone who seems human, but who is dead
inside, a state perhaps best reflected in his “glarynge eyen,” those empty windows to his
soul (Pearsall 361).
Jews in the medieval Christian tradition are also depicted as spiritually dead, because
only the spirit gives life. The Jew that Shakespeare drew, I would suggest, hits the
European canon of representation of Jews with such concussive force because Shylock
displays glimpses of a living humanity; he is a “type,” indeed he becomes one of the
most important “types” in the anti-Semitic arsenal, but Shakespeare’s depiction is not
simply of a type but also of a human being. The shock of Shylock comes from the fact
Figure 3Breviary of Renaud de Bar, Verdun, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 107, fol. 101r. Reprinted
with permission from the Bibliothèque municipale, Verdun.
354 LISA LAMPERT-WEISSIG
that before his appearance we are hard-pressed to find representation of an unconverted
Jew who is not simply a knot of unbroken chains of sin.
The Pardoner is, then, a hollow man and Chaucer draws upon the perceived spiritual
emptiness of the Jews to amplify this portrayal. The Pardoner’s sexuality, even while its
particulars may be subject to interpretation, is clearly something debased, devoid of love,
and even of reproductive purpose. So too did medieval Christians portray the rituals and
the faith of the Jews as dead and pointless. The Pardoner’s relics and even his sermon
require living faith in order to eect good. The Pardoner’s faith is empty and fruitless;
Chaucer’s references to the Jews evoke and reinforce that depiction of the Pardoner’s
barren state. The Pardoner and his relics lay bare the way that the relationship between
the spiritual and material can be twisted and perverted; invoking the anti-Judaism that
animates relic discourse deepens and reinforces this portrayal.
We can see another glimpse of these connections in the conclusion to the tale, one that
some critics have made the object of a tug-of-war between readings which emphasize the
tale’s fake relics and those focused more on the Pardoner’s ambiguous sexuality. After the
Pardoner calls the Host to come forth and kiss his relics, the latter explodes:
“Nay, nay!” quod he, “thanne have I Cristes curs!
Lat be,” quod he, “it shal nat be, so theech!
Thou woldest make me kisse thyn olde breech,
And swere it were a relyk of a seint,
Though it were with thy fundement depeint!
But, by the croys which that Seint Eleyne fond,
I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond
In stide of relikes or of seintuarie.
Lat kutte hem of, I wol thee helpe hem carie;
They shul be shryned in an hogges toord!” (VI.946–55)
Critics sometimes discuss this outburst in relation to a familiar passage in the Roman de
la Rose that also mixes “coillons” and “reliques” in order to stress the arbitrary nature
of the linguistic sign.47 Relics, we are told, could mean testicles or vice versa depending
on our choice. Minnis has asserted that here “Chaucer’s concern is not with linguistic
substitution but rather with the substitution of a ‘relyk’ of debatable power for a genu-
ine one” (“Into the Breech” 287). A true relic asks us to look beyond the surface to the
meaning beneath, a hermeneutics central to this tale. Grasping true meaning, as the
Pardoner’s sermon shows, is the path to salvation. The Host, by threatening to create a
new, false relic out of the body of a sinner who tracs in such fakeries, responds to the
Pardoner’s attempt to manipulate him with a violent, profane parody of the Christian
belief of the presence of the divine in the material.
The besmeared breeches and testicles enshrined in turds imagined by the Host are not,
however, the only “relics” in his tirade. The debased nature of these objects is empha-
sized by Harry’s oath on the True Cross, of which Jacques Le Go asserts, “there is no
more sacred relic in Christianity” (108). The Host’s oath references the Cross through
its discovery: “by the croys which that Seint Eleyne fond” (VI.951). The Jews serve as
CHAUCER'S PARDONER AND THE JEWS 355
authenticators and guides in the narrative of Helena’s recovery of the Cross to such
a degree that Thomas Renna sees the narrative as a kind of “index of hagiographical
attitudes toward the Jews” (138).48 As Renna puts it, the story of the “Cross somehow
became the story of the Jews” (139). When Constantine sent his mother to find the Cross,
she began her quest by rounding up the Jewish wise men of Jerusalem, one of whom,
Judas, had to be forced to reveal the Cross’s whereabouts. Judas is converted through
his experience and becomes Judas Cyriacus.
Judas Cyriacus’s story bears similarity to the legend of the Wandering Jew in several
ways, including through its temporality. The account of the finding of the True Cross
in the Legenda Aurea refers to an enigmatic source stating that Judas Cyriacus has sur-
vived since the time of the Crucifixion, which would make him 272years old. Perhaps,
the Legenda Aurea posits, he is the son of someone from this time, or perhaps men of
that age were long-lived, but, whatever his actual age, he and his fellow Jews are, if not
eye-witnesses, still witnesses who can guide Christians to the sacred relic of their Lord,
even though they are themselves unbelievers.49 Harry Bailey’s invocation of the story of
the finding of the True Cross, then, is an invocation of the role of Jewish unbelievers in
this quest, as desecrators who reveal the holy.
When Christians invoke holy matter, whether in earnest or in “pleye,” they seem
to need the Jews as witness to that holiness (VI.958). As Dominque Iogna-Pratt puts
it, “Just as in the world of physical sciences matter presupposes antimatter, so … the
Christian order postulated the disorder of the Jews” (315). In The Pardoner’s Prologue
and Ta l e we find a complex set of associations that structure this “antimatter”: in the
attack by the Host, in the subtle linking of Jews to lechery, specifically homosexuality
in The General Prologue reference to the hare, through the vaguely sinister potential of
the relic of the holy Jew’s sheep, and, of course, in the shadow of the Wandering Jew in
the enigmatic Old Man, whose wasting body seems both a sign of sin and a reminder
of the complex nature of Christian materiality. These and other elements of Chaucer’s
creation of the Pardoner and his tale, especially his depictions of the Pardoner’s body
and sexuality and of his phony relics, are not competing with each other; they reinforce
one another. Looking beyond individual references to the Jew to recognize the broader
context of anti-Judaism, acknowledging it as a shaping force in the structure of medieval
Christian thought, helps to reveal these connections. Another way to understand these
connections is to return to Morrison’s metaphor of the fishbowl. If we are trying, then,
to discern “the structure that transparently (and invisibly)” frames Chaucer’s world, we
cannot do so without the figure of the Jew.
Like the Pardoner, “the Jew” might be, despite the many nuances that scholars have
revealed, a zero sum. The Jew, like the Pardoner, confounds and this is perhaps why
Chaucer includes the Jewish “details” in the Pardoner’s portrayal. In relic discourse
the Jews are confounding, yet also foundational, as they are figured simultaneously as
authenticators and deniers of Christian truth. Chaucer’s Jewish details further illuminate
the paradoxes in Christian materiality that the Pardoner’s sham practices call to the fore.
The Jewish “stubborn” resistance to Christian supersession is also confounding. Actual
believing Jews and a living, developing Jewish faith upset the Christian temporal frame
356 LISA LAMPERT-WEISSIG
and thus the representation of “the Jew” is often associated with a bending of time. The
“eternal” nature of the Wandering Jew attempts to lock the Jew into a state that is para-
doxically liminal and static — always believing yet never redeemed — hoping endlessly
for a redemption that can only come according to a Christian telos. These elements in
anti-Judaic discourse deepen Chaucer’s portrayal of the Pardoner, a man who seems to be
throwing himself headlong — and willingly — into eternal damnation. The Wandering
Jew and the other Jewish elements that haunt this portrayal come trailing clouds of a
dark immortality that help to depict what the nature of such an eternity might be.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Kathy Lavezzo, Hannah Johnson, Heather Blurton, and the two anony-
mous reviewers for their suggestions on this essay. I owe a debt of thanks to Profs. Jincai
Yang and Lei Yu for providing me with the opportunity to first speak on this topic at
Nanjing University, where the audience asked terrific, probing questions. Thanks also go
to Nina Zhiri, Seth Lerer, Asa Mittman, and Denise Despres for their help with research
questions and to Geisel Library at UC San Diego for funding to make this work Open
Access.
Notes
1 Cohen first discussed the hermeneutical Jew in
“The Muslim Connection” (1996) and expanded the
discussion in Living Letters (1999), as noted in the
latter (3 n.3).
2
See Biddick, “Paper Jews”; Narin van Court, “Socially
Marginal”; Despres, “Protean Jew”; Tomasch,
“Postcolonial Chaucer”; Kruger, Spectral Jew; and
Lavezzo, Accommodated Jew.
3 I first heard this formulation from Daniel Boyarin.
See also Nirenberg’s magisterial Anti-Judaism (the UK
subtitle of which is, notably, The History of a Way
of Thinking).
4 Anderson’s is the definitive work on the history of the
Wandering Jew legend. He and other scholars believe
the Wandering Jew legend circulated in England, likely
in oral form, throughout the medieval period (31–32).
5 On “self-definition,” see Morrison 43. “Christian
materiality” comes from the title of Bynum’s 2011
book.
6 All quotations from The Canterbury Tales are taken
from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., gen. ed. Benson.
Citations refer to fragment and line numbers and
appear parenthetically in the body of the essay.
7 Kruger 139, 128 n.39. See also 122–23 n.21.
8 On the “material turn,” see Houtman and Meyer.
9 For a dierent approach to the Jew in the Pardoner’s
Ta l e , see Krummel, Crafting 107–10 and “Semitic
Discourse.”
10 For the Old Man as vetus homo, see Miller. Hamilton
reads him as a figure for Old Age. Ten Brink was
the first to connect the Old Man to the Wandering
Jew. See also Bushnell; Richardson; and Pearcy;
for additional sources see Sutton. Ko reads the
Old Man in conjunction with Levinas. It would
be interesting to read The Pardoner’s Tale more
specifically against explorations of Judaism and Jewish
identity in Levinas’s work, including his “Israel and
Universalism.” See the conclusion to Lampert, Gender
and Jewish Dierence from Paul to Shakespeare.
11 See Lampert-Weissig, “The Wandering Jew as Relic.”
12 Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, edited by Luard
(abbreviated henceforth as CM), 5.340–41. All
quotations are taken from Luard’s edition, refer
to volume and page numbers, and will appear
parenthetically in the body of the text. Translation
adapted from Anderson 21. See also Lewis, and
Lampert-Weissig, “Wandering Jew as Relic.”
13 On contact relics in the CM, see Lewis 304–13; for a
definition of contact relics, see Merback 194–95.
14 Lewis transcribes the banners as: “Vade Jhesu ad
iudicium tibi preparatum” and “Vado sicut scriptum
est de me. Tu vero expectabis donec veniam” (303).
15 See Mellinko, Outcasts vol. 1, 130, and Bale 65–89.
16 The pagination here reflects recent changes to
pagination due to digitization. The previous “ocial”
pagination locates the Wandering Jew image on fol.
CHAUCER'S PARDONER AND THE JEWS 357
70v, as it is found referenced in works such as Lewis’s.
My thanks to Elizabeth Dumas of Corpus Christi
College, Cambridge, for her help with accessing this
image.
17 See Dinshaw 178.
18
For an important discussion of metaphors of sight and
seeing in relation to medieval representation of Jews
and Judaism, see Lipton.
19 On Synagoga and Ecclesia, see Rose; Rowe; and
Seiferth.
20 Augustine, Sermo 263, PL 38. Sant’ Agostino:
Augustinus Hipponensis<http://www.augustinus.it>
Cited in Lipton 64, 304 n.27.
21 Adversus Iudaeorum inveteratam duritiem, CCCM
58.10.
22 See Malo, Relics. On Jews in grail narrative see
Lampert-Weissig, “Knight”; for a dierent view on
these representations, see Newman 70–83.
23 See Bynum, “Bleeding,” “Presence,” and Wonderful
Blood, as well as Merback, Pilgrimage.
24 I owe this formulation to a private communication
with Denise Despres. See also Lipton, especially 81–84.
25 Jordan 29, 33.
26 On Jews and magic, see Mesler.
27 This relic must be meant to have belonged to an “Old
Testament” Jew, its temporal provenance essential
to its “holiness.” As we can see from the debates
associated with the burning of the Talmud in the
1240s in Paris, the idea that Judaism might continue
to be a living, developing faith posed a deep threat
to medieval Christian claims of spiritual supremacy.
Judaism before the time of Christ can be remembered
and revered in the service of Christian teachings and
Jews themselves must be preserved for their future role
in the End-Times. Believing Jews cannot, however, be
imagined as coeval with Christianity. There literally
is “no time” for these Jews and any texts, objects, or
practices from this time in-between must be suppressed
or even destroyed. On the Talmud trials, see volumes
by Chazan, Friedman and Ho.
28 On the accusation that Jews poisoned wells, see
Foa 13, and Mesler 269–324. Violence against Jews
during the Black Death epidemic was not as extreme
in Flanders as elsewhere in Europe, but it did occur
(Cohn 8). The chronicle of Gilles Le Muisit of Tournai
(1272–1352) includes an image of Jews being burned
alive in Flanders during plague time (see Brussels,
Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, MS 13076/7, fol. 12
v
;
reproduced in Descatoire 23.) Interestingly, given the
role of treasure in the tale, Jewish communities did
bury treasure during times of persecution, including
during the plague. On treasure buried by Anglo-Jews
prior to the 1290 Expulsion, see Brooks, et al., and
for Jewish plague-time buried treasure elsewhere in
medieval Europe, see Descatoire.
29 Miller associates “Ronyan” with “coillons” (194).
30 The Pardoner “engages in villainous swearing by God
and Lord Jesus … on the pretext of an attack on those
who utter outrageous oaths” (Minnis, Fallible 138).
31 On the Hailes relic as the object of doubt, see Storm
815. See also Vincent 137–54, and Baddeley.
32
On the Jew as Christ-killer, see Cohen, “Christ Killer.”
That their swearing is “grisly,” a word with OE roots
that connect to rubbing or grating (OED, s.v. “grisly”),
evokes a physical eect. My thanks to Charlie Wright
for advice on this etymology.
33 On the swearer as a “Jew,” see Bale 62.
34 The Parson’s Tale X(I).590.
35 Citation and translation from Russell 18.
36 See Bestul.
37 See Bale, and Cohen, “Christ Killers.”
38 Gill argues for swearing as “almost an inversion of
transubstantiation that amplified Christ’s suering and
wounded the speaker” (151).
39 Kruger, in relation to a discussion of the Pardoner’s
body, notes that, “a bodily corruption is associated
with Judaism” (“Claiming” 128 n.39).
40 On the scale of the Pardoner’s risk of damnation and
its relationship to other aspects of his character see
Minnis, Fallible 97.
41 See note in The Riverside Chaucer.
42 See Rowland.
43 On Jewish appropriations of the hare as symbol, see
Epstein.
44 PL 113.464. Cited in Schweitzer 250.
45 I am grateful to a private communication from Alison
Stones for help understanding the Breviary images.
46 Cited in Kruger, “Claiming” 124.
47 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Roman de
la Rose, edited by Lecoy, lines 7076–85. See Minnis,
“Breech” 287.
48 See also Limor.
49 Jacobus de Voragine 281 of 277–84. See also Lipton
85–90.
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Note on contributor
Lisa Lampert-Weissig is Professor of English Literature and Comparative Medieval
Studies at the University of California, San Diego, where she also holds the Katzin Chair
in Jewish Civilization. Her scholarship includes Gender and Jewish Dierence from Paul
to Shakespeare (2004) and Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies (2010).
Correspondence to: Lisa Lampert-Weissig. Email: llampert@ucsd.edu
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England during the Middle Ages was at the forefront of European antisemitism. It was in medieval Norwich that the notorious “blood libel” was first introduced when a resident accused the city’s Jewish leaders of abducting and ritually murdering a local boy. England also enforced legislation demanding that Jews wear a badge of infamy, and in 1290, it became the first European nation to expel forcibly all of its Jewish residents. In The Accommodated Jew, Kathy Lavezzo rethinks the complex and contradictory relation between England’s rejection of “the Jew” and the centrality of Jews to classic English literature. Drawing on literary, historical, and cartographic texts, she charts an entangled Jewish imaginative presence in English culture. In a sweeping view that extends from the Anglo-Saxon period to the late seventeenth century, Lavezzo tracks how English writers from Bede to Milton imagine Jews via buildings-tombs, latrines and especially houses-that support fantasies of exile. Epitomizing this trope is the blood libel and its implication that Jews cannot be accommodated in England because of the anti-Christian violence they allegedly perform in their homes. In the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the Jewish house not only serves as a lethal trap but also as the site of an emerging bourgeoisie incompatible with Christian pieties. Lavezzo reveals the central place of “the Jew” in the slow process by which a Christian “nation of shopkeepers” negotiated their relationship to the urban capitalist sensibility they came to embrace and embody. In the book’s epilogue, she advances her inquiry into Victorian England and the relationship between Charles Dickens (whose Fagin is the second most infamous Jew in English literature after Shylock) and the Jewish couple that purchased his London home, Tavistock House, showing how far relations between gentiles and Jews in England had (and had not) evolved.
Book
In Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred, Barbara Newman offers a new approach to the many ways that sacred and secular interact in medieval literature, arguing that the sacred was the normative, unmarked default category against which the secular always had to define itself and establish its niche. Newman refers to this dialectical relationship as "crossover"-which is not a genre in itself, but a mode of interaction, an openness to the meeting or even merger of sacred and secular in a wide variety of forms. Newman sketches a few of the principles that shape their interaction: the hermeneutics of "both/and," the principle of double judgment, the confluence of pagan material and Christian meaning in Arthurian romance, the rule of convergent idealism in hagiographic romance, and the double-edged sword in parody. Medieval Crossover explores a wealth of case studies in French, English, and Latin texts that concentrate on instances of paradox, collision, and convergence. Newman convincingly and with great clarity demonstrates the widespread applicability of the crossover concept as an analytical tool, examining some very disparate works.