Part 1 of Essay
The Wife of Bath and the Pardoner are both given particularly ample space to expose their own way of living before telling their Tales, in developed Prologues which have certain qualities in common. In both cases, the speaker seems unaware that the hearers (the readers) might not be so full of admiration as they seem to b ....

Part 2 of Essay
.... shame, illustrating the way it lives. Chaucer found examples of this in the Romance of the Rose, the Pardoner's Prologue has some vague similarities with the figure Faux-Semblant (False Seeming) found there. As seen in the General Prologue, a pardoner is a layman who sells pardons or indulgences, certificates from the pope by which people hoped to gain a share in the merits of the saints and escape more lightly from the pains of Purgatory after they died. This particular Pardoner works for a religious house notori ....