The Canterbury Tales Analysis

The Catholic Church classifies pride, lust, gluttony, envy, greed, laziness, and wrath as the seven deadly sins. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, he analyzes each of these sins and their influence on the lives of pilgrims making their way to Canterbury. Among these pilgrims, the reader would stumble upon a nun and a pardoner. Although the nun and the pardoner share employment in conjunction with the Catholic Church, the sins of which they are guilty differ immensely, as do their appearances. Among the pilgrims, a woman traveled by the name of Madame Englantine. This woman was a prioress, which was reflected in her speech. Although she spoke French fluently, it was evident it was convent taught and not the Paris style of French. …show more content…
The morals of a nun include an oath to serve all other living beings, to leave the mainstream fashion and society, a life of celibacy, and to live her life in prayer. She, on the other hand, enjoyed her fine cloak and beautiful beads. Among the morality of the pilgrims, traveled a cheat, a scoundrel of the church. The pardoner came to join the journey to profit from his profession more than his usual. Unlike the nun, who was all grace and beauty, the pardoner was a grotesque man, with the morals of a snake. His eyes appeared to be popping out of his skull, his yellow hair was unclean and in rat-like dreads, and his voice was like nails on a chalkboard. The shrill voice was but a fragment of what made him such a bothersome person to be around. The pardoner was such a loathsome person that he sold his profits to people after they made their confessions. Not only did he sell pardons, he also carried with him a bag of fraudulent relics. In this bag, the relics included Mary’s veil, a piece of canvas from the sail of Saint Peter’s fishing boat, a crucifix made of brass and jewels, and even a jar of pig bones. All a person would have to do is pay a small fee and then his sacred relics could bless