Jean Gobi’s Pardoner Tales

Two important recent books might be thought to have exhausted all available avenues of investigation into the social and theological background to Chaucer’s portrait of the Pardoner: R. N. Swanson’s Indulgences in Late Medieval England: Passports to Paradise? (2007) provides a detailed historical account of the role of indulgences in late medieval English society, offering a multitude of valuable insights into the activities of professional pardoners along the way, ¹ while Alastair Minnis’s Fallible Authors: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Wife of Bath (2008) applies a meticulous analysis of the ecclesiology of medieval indulgences to an explication of the many ambiguities and cruces in Chaucer’s own portrait of the Pardoner. ² In a slightly earlier study (2006), Minnis had further observed that Chaucer does not seem to have found “the pardoner-figure . . . pre-formed as a stereotype of vernacular estates satire,” ³ and that the traits satirized in his portrait are those more commonly associated with other figures (such as friars) by earlier writers—a point that would have required no modification even if John Block Friedman’s coincident discussion of Rutebeuf’s huckster figures had been available to him. ⁴ But while there may be no evidence in an earlier vernacular tradition of the Pardoner as a satirical stereotype, I shall show here that there is evidence for such a figure in Latin, specifically in the tradition of the sermon exemplum. Given the ease with which materials in this tradition moved between Latin and the vernacular, it would be rash to assume (not that Minnis does assume this) that Chaucer’s Pardoner had no vernacular precursors.

Sometime between 1323 and 1330, a French Dominican called Jean Gobi from the Convent of St. Maximin in Provence gathered into a collection called the Scala coeli almost a thousand exempla and organized them under a set of alphabetized headings. ⁵ For Chaucerians this collection is of particular interest for its five stories about disreputable pardoners (headed De Questore ), four of which (906, 907, 908, and 906A) predate the Canterbury Tales by about a hundred years, while a fifth (906B), though it may well have circulated orally earlier, seems to have been added to the collection only after Gobi’s time. While none of these exempla seems to have been original with Gobi, none is calendared in Frederic C. Tubach’s Index Exemplorum. ⁶ Gobi appears to have adapted the first four at least from an unedited late thirteenth-century Dominican collection from the region of the Touraine, Maine, and Anjou called the Compilacio singularis exemplorum⁷ —a work Gobi himself refers to, confusingly, as the Speculum exemplorum. ⁸ While none is a direct source for Chaucer’s own portrait, these exempla provide strong evidence that the pardoner was already a type of the avaricious trickster long before the Pardoner’s Tale, and offer useful confirmation of Albert C. Friend’s suggestion that Chaucer may have found source material for his portrait of the Pardoner in the exemplum tradition. ⁹ (It has of course long been recognized that the Pardoner’s actual tale of the three revelers and their search for Death draws directly upon this tradition). ¹⁰ All five stories are concerned with avarice (the pardoner’s winnings) in some form, and in four of them pardoners are shown preaching; interestingly, two also imply a traditional enmity between women and pardoners; finally, two of them are concerned with phony miracles, and one with a phony relic.

In the first of Gobi’s stories, a corrupt pardoner is hauled up before his bishop because he has been reported to have been sowing errors (“quod seminaret errores”). This phrase is ambiguous enough, but in Gobi’s source (the Compilacio singularis exemplorum) he is said specifically to have been preaching heresies (“quod predicabat hereses”). ¹¹ Both Gobi and his source, moreover, give us the subject of the model sermon that the pardoner then preaches to exculpate himself, and neither has anything directly to do with pardons: in Gobi, he is said to have given an excellent sermon he knew on the Faith (“unum sermonem quem sciebat de fide...