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THE CONSTRUCTION of CHAUCER's PARDONER Alastair Minnis the Corpus of Latin Literature on Indulgences Is Vast

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THE CONSTRUCTION of CHAUCER's PARDONER Alastair Minnis the Corpus of Latin Literature on Indulgences Is Vast THE CONSTRUCTION OF CHAUCER’S PARDONER Alastair Minnis The corpus of Latin literature on indulgences is vast; much of it has been under-studied, and several of the most significant discussions remain unedited. Albert “the Great” of Cologne, Bonaventure of Bagnorea, Durandus of St. Pourçain, Francesco della Rossa Bartholi, Francis of Meyronnes, John Baconthorpe, John of Dambach, John of Salisbury, Peter Abelard, Peter of Blois, Peter the Chanter, Peter of Poitiers, Peter John Olivi, Peter of la Palud, Peter of Tarantasia, Richard Godmersham, Robert Courson, Senatus of Worcester, Simon of Cremona, Stephen Langton, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas of Chobham, William Lyndwood, William of Auvergne, William of Auxerre....1 Those are just a few among the large number of schol- ars who had important things to say about the theology which under- pinned indulgences, many of the later accounts appearing in commentaries on the fourth book of Peter Lombard’s Sentences (a major locus classicus for relevant discussion). Interest in the topic was international, even as the practice of dispensing indulgences was inter- national. When we seek material on pardons and pardoners in the several national vernaculars, however, an uneven pattern emerges, and some of the pickings are slim. In the Chanson de Roland Bishop Turpin offers Charlemagne’s troops absolution before they battle against the Saracens, so that if they die they will be “holy martyrs,” seated in “highest paradise” (1130–5).2 This statement is illustrative of early thought about how indulgences can ensure safe passage to heaven through martyrdom, and is of interest in relation to the developing theory and practice of crusad- ing indulgences. But the Old French text itself makes little of it. In 1 For the twelfth-century figures here named, see especially Nicholas Vincent, “Some Pardoners’ Tales: The Earliest English Indulgences,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 12 (2002), 23–58. 2 La Chanson de Roland, ed. Gerard J. Brault (University Park, PA, and London, 1984), pp. 72–73. I am grateful to Eugene Vance for drawing my attention to this passage, and to him, William Calin, Richard Firth Green and Douglas Kelly for assisting me in my search for vernacular traditions concerning pardons and pardoners. 170 alastair minnis the Roman de la Rose, Jean de Meun’s Faus Semblant, long acknowl- edged as a model for Chaucer’s Pardoner, is himself not a pardoner, but rather identified as a friar. A similar point may be made about Fra Cipolla in Boccaccio’s Decameron (sixth day, tenth tale), a figure sometimes cited as an analogue to Chaucer’s construct; he has an association with St. Anthony’s hospital, which employed many par- doners, but is not said to be one of them. The same institution was attacked by Dante in Paradiso xxix, 115–29, where its pardoners are criticized as preaching for profit, and the value of their pardons sub- tly questioned.3 However, even though he set his Comedy in the (first) papal jubilee year of 1300, Dante does not comment specifically on the indulgence which his great enemy Pope Boniface VIII had issued on that occasion, a document which became the source of much confusion, not least because a forged version (offering more gener- ous terms than the original) enjoyed wide circulation. The French Cistercian Guillaume de Deguileville did not think indulgences wor- thy of allegorical exploitation, to judge from the sequence of pèleri- nage poems which he composed during the period 1330–60;4 for that we must turn to the troubling “tearing of the Pardon” episode in William Langland’s Piers Plowman (A VIII; B VII; C IX; Z VII).5 Moving to fifteenth-century Italy, a relevant story may be found in the Novellino of Masuccio Salernitano (c. 1410?–75). Its main inter- est is in how an unscrupulous Franciscan friar, named Ieronimo da Spoleto, deceives credulous people with a spurious relic and a fake miracle. However, the tale includes a general diatribe about the many ways in which the friars’ avaricious enterprises have cost “luck- 3 References to abuses associated with members of St. Anthony’s hospital are cited by Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 150–52. 4 Le pèlerinage de l’âme (c.1358) does speak of a “don de grace especial” sent from Christ to the human soul by means of “lectres sëeles” (ll. 2365–66, 2383). Although in describing it De Deguileville alludes to the treasury of merit (“Du tresor de ma passion...Des merites de ma mere...Des merites de tous mes sains,” ll. 2425–29), he does not develop a documentary allegory based on a standard form of indul- gence: Le pèlerinage de l’âme, ed. J. J. Stürzinger (London, 1895), pp. 83–86. In the fifteenth-century Middle English translation of this poem, the text is termed “a chartre of pardoun,” and (particularly in its opening lines) identified as a royal par- don rather than an indulgence. The Pilgrimage of the Soul: A Critical Edition of the Middle English Dream Vision, ed. R. Potz McGerr (New York and London, 1990), pp. 48–51; see further M. C. Spalding, The Middle English Charters of Christ (Bryn Mawr, PA, 1914), p. xvii. 5 See Alastair Minnis, “Piers’ Protean Pardon: The Letter and Spirit of Langland’s Theology of Indulgences” in Studies in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Texts in Honour of John Scattergood, ed. Anne Marie D’Arcy and Alan J. Fletcher (Dublin, 2005), pp. 218–40. .
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