Spiritual Sickness in the Physician's and Pardoner's Tales: Themetic Unity in Fragment VI of the 'Canterbury Tale'

Author / Editor
Trower, Katherine B.

Title
Spiritual Sickness in the Physician's and Pardoner's Tales: Themetic Unity in Fragment VI of the 'Canterbury Tale'

Published
American Benedictine Review 29 (1978): 67-86.

Description
The Physcian and the Pardoner both claim to be healers, but both capitalize on human sickness. Their function as healers is ironically undercut and their tales are thematically related by a common vision of death as terminal rather than transcendent and by an implicit repudiation of the life of the spirit.

Chaucer Subjects
Physician and His Tale
Pardoner and His Tale