Kissing the Pardoner

Author / Editor
Burger, Glenn.

Title
Kissing the Pardoner

Published
PMLA 107 (1992): 1143-56.

Description
Reads the kiss between the Pardoner and the Host at the end of PardT as a challenge to "the repressive binaries of a hermeneutical model based on heterosexual reproduction." The Pardoner inverts dominant ideology, and the kiss brings to readers' consciousness its own participation in the "politics of inversion and perversion." For a response and reply, see Ann Barbeau Gardiner, "The Medieval Kiss"; and Glenn Burger, "The Medieval Kiss: Reply."

Chaucer Subjects
Pardoner and His Tale.