Abstract :
For us, readers of Chaucer living in an age when appeal to religious passions and
sentiments as a means for the realization of worldly objectives by some charlatans
has grown significantly, reviewing the theme of religious hypocrisy treated in The
Canterbury Tales can be useful in a way that it proves a helpful means for
recognizing and dealing with the hypocrites. The Pardoner of the Tales is definitely
and consensually the most horrible hypocrite character in English literature, and this
is evident from both the narrator s description of this character in the General
Prologue and in his own self-confession in the prologue to his tale. Accordingly, the
hypocrisy of the Pardoner has been a matter of debates and discussions from the
very beginning of critical tradition on this character and his tale. The basic view of
this critical tradition, however, is that in dealing with the hypocrisy of the Pardoner
and in creating this character, Chaucer has drawn on different literary and
theological sources. The first part of this study is an attempt to trace instances of the
influence of Biblical definition of the word hypocrisy and biblical description of
hypocrites in the character of the Pardoner. In the second part, the presence of traces
of the Antichrist tradition with hypocrisy as a major attribute of the Antichrist figure
will be treated in this character.
