Economy, representation, and the sale of indulgences in late-Medieval England
Abstract
This dissertation explores the coexistent yet contradictory narrative processes to which the sale of indulgences was subject in the fourteenth century. This institution demanded interpretation from both orthodoxy and heresy: the former to delineate and protect it, the latter to contest it. Yet, the binary implied by this set of competing discourses was shattered by poets who fictionalized and dramatized pardons, attempting neither to condemn them out of hand nor to defend their current status, but to reimagine and reinvent them, as defenders and opponents of indulgences did, but in a medium more flexible than councils or treatises. Thus, while the exchange of alms for pardon was imagined as corrupt, it was also construed redemptively, idealistically, and humorously. ^ The doctrinal establishment of the institution in the thirteenth century was grounded in an economic idealism. During the next century, pardon's supporters used the language of forgery and counterfeiting to transform pardoners into blameworthy yet relatively harmless villains. By contrast, Wyclif and his followers constructed an ideally rotten pardon, modelled on the letter of confraternity, to serve as their target. ^ Poetry, however, offered perhaps the most appropriate opportunity to imagine indulgences, and it yielded approaches both playful and desperately imaginative. Chaucer's nefarious Pardoner nimbly defies our expectations of a narrowly corrupt character; he only confirms his fraud when his admission cannot be taken seriously. His behavior, obviously false but artfully defiant of blame, represents the behavior set forth in church councils that purport to describe the pardoner's actions. ^ The narrative fluidity of the sale of pardon allowed Langland to devise an alternative to the binaries posited by councils and Wyclif. He recenters the act of receiving pardon onto the act of giving charity, imputing to pardon a measure of the idealism on which it was founded while grounding this idealism in a new paradigm of donation. This paradigm, however, can only exist in the fictionalizing realm of verse: beyond the protection of the indulgence's doctrinal trappings, only poetry can redeem pardon. ^
Subject Area
Literature, Medieval|Literature, English
Recommended Citation
Lana Schwebel,
"Economy, representation, and the sale of indulgences in late-Medieval England"
(January 1, 2001).
Dissertations available from ProQuest.
Paper AAI3015369.
http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI3015369
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