Guess what all you loyal followers. I'm reading the famous book of the English language by Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, but more specifically, 'The Pardoners Tale.' Now I know this is just such a fun book to read so I have to do the super fun assignment of telling the examples of this specific short story in the collection being an exemplum. So let's begin
First lets get the definition of an exemplum straight outta google. exemplum [ig-zem-pluh m] Spell Syllables noun, plural exempla [ig-zem-pluh] An anecdote that illustrates or supports a moral point, as in a medieval sermon. Now if we want to get some examples. We can start as far back as foreshadowing of the prologue where the Pardoner himself states that "I preach against the very sin I make my living out of-Avarice," this not only shows that the Pardoner will be a bad moral, as expected as Chaucer was very much against the practice of indulgences in the then contemporary time, but it also helps to show the moral of the story as being against Avarice due to the negative wording of it. Another part of exemplum is the concept of the characters being allegories, this is found in the first page with the character of death who has supposedly "killed a thousand in the current plague..." thus with the large body count and the time this book was written, we could make the assumption that Death is a metaphor for the Bubonic Plague that struck Europe in the Middle Ages and killed off 60% of the European population in 3 years. Another significant character is the gambler who shows himself to be a bad character in that he is not exactly intelligent and he continually jumps to conclusions and rarely thinks things through before doing them suc has hunting down Death and attacking an old man for supposedly working with Death. Which reinforces the moral lesson that Chaucer is trying to make in not being quick to anger and being patient
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June 2016
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