Chaucer's Pardoner: Food, Drink, and the Discourse of Desecration.

Description: Builds on previous readings of PardT that identify its descriptions of food, especially bread and wine, as part of its parody of the Christian mass and Eucharist. Demonstrates that Chaucer uses specifically Wycliffite terms when referring to food and the body. The Pardoner's sacrilegious imagery includes not only desecrations of Christian ritual but attacks on the very body of Christ. Concludes that the effect of the Pardoner's performance is to "evoke in the reader or listener a Christless world, violate, broken by sin."