Chaucer's Pardoner's Beneficent LIe

Author / Editor
Bauschatz, Paul C.

Title
Chaucer's Pardoner's Beneficent LIe

Published
Assays 2 (1983): 19-43.

Description
Matches Augustine's "("De mendacio") moral distinctions among kinds of utterance with Anselm's logical distinctions among kinds of predication; discovers that Augustine refuses to recognize the possibility of "beneficent lying." Argues that Chaucer includes the "beneficent lie" in PardT to reveal that "all language is a trap."

Chaucer Subjects
Pardoner and His Tale.