Laughing at Church Abuse in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales: Satire as a Tool for Reform

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the use of satire to criticize church abuse in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Humor, wit, laughter and irony abound in the descriptions of clerical characters in The Canterbury Tales. And, through satirical and humorous ways in which they are depicted, The Canterbury Tales is intended to enlighten and educate the audience to the abuses of the Church. The point of Chaucer's anticlerical satire is to underscore the "morally reprehensible disjunction between religious precept and religious practice." The satire is directed against individual clerical figures who are guilty of abusing their clerical office rather than against the whole clerical status per se. The proof of this lies in the omission of the higher clergy from the General Prologue and most of the tales themselves as well as singling out for satire, marginal figures such as the Friar or the Pardoner for satire. In so doing Chaucer is careful to contain his biting anticlerical satire in The Canterbury Tales from devolving into a sharp cleavage and redirecting it towards "moral and spiritual self-evaluation." (Seoul Theological University)