¹ The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton, 1957), p. 23. All subsequent references to the Canterbury Tales are to this edition.

² Other arguments supporting the notion of the Pardoner's homosexuality, in the order of their earliest published form, are Muriel Bowden, A Commentary on the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (New York: Macmillan, 1948), pp. 274–76; Gordon Hall Gerould, Chaucerian Essays (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1952), pp. 58–60; Beryl Rowland, “Animal Imagery and the Pardoner's Abnormality,” Neophilolo-gus, 48 (1964), 56–60; Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 145–52; and John Gardner, The Poetry of Chaucer (Carbon-dale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 301–03.

³ Curry, Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1926), pp. 54–70.

⁴ Miller, “Chaucer's Pardoner, the Scriptural Eunuch, and the Pardoner's Tale” Speculum, 30 (1955), 180–99.

⁵ The medical and physiognomical texts Curry studied present a secular version of the physical determinism rejected by the biblical commentators. Thus if Chaucer knew both the scientific and the scriptural traditions of interpretation, he confronted not monolithic agreement but obvious conflict on the subject of eunuchry.

⁶ Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976), pp. 342–45.

⁷ Howard, ed., Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, a Selection (New York: NAL, 1969), p. 88. These glosses seem to reflect both a closer adherence to Curry's views and an interpretation of the terms that differs from the one Howard adopts in The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (1976). In the latter work I cannot identify a gloss for “mare” that would elucidate what a medieval audience understood by the term. Howard says only that Chaucer's line suggests that the Pardoner “is sexually peculiar—that he lacks something: like a gelding the physical equipment, or like a mare the male gender-identity” (p. 343).

⁸ Fisher, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer (New York: Holt, 1977), p. 22; Baugh, ed., Chaucer's Major Poetry (New York: Meredith, 1963), p. 253. Three other editors do not gloss either term: Robinson; E. T. Donaldson, ed., Chaucer's Poetry: An Anthology (New York: Ronald, 1958); and Robert A. Pratt, ed., The Tales of Canterbury (Boston: Houghton, 1974). In his Commentary, Donaldson adopts the view that the Pardoner is a eunuch (p. 900).

⁹ Applied to human beings, “mare” is usually a contemptuous term for a woman: “a slut.” While both the MED and the OED cite Canterbury Tales i.691 s.v. “geldyng,” neither treats Chaucer's use of “mare” in the entry for that word. Similarly, Thomas Ross, in Chaucer's Bawdy (New York: Dutton, 1972), has a page-long entry for “geldyng” (p. 94) but for “mare” offers only a cross-reference to an unhelpful entry for “horse” (pp. 145, 111).

¹⁰ Jill Mann, “Chaucer and the Medieval Latin Poets, Part B: The Satiric Tradition,” in Writers and Their Background: Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Derek Brewer (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1975), p. 172.

¹¹ The word was coined by a Hungarian doctor named Benkert; see Arno Karlen, Sexuality and Homosexuality: A New View (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 187. The gloss “a homosexual,” however—-like “a eunuch,” the common gloss for “geldyng”—does not accurately reflect the colloquial flavor of Chaucer's line. The best gloss for “mare” would probably be a slang term for the effeminate male homosexual.

¹² Gen. xix.1–11. The interpretation of the special sin of Sodom and Gomorrah as homosexuality was established in the first century A.D. by Palestinian Jews hostile to Hellenistic culture. On the rejection of this interpretation by modern biblical scholarship, see Derrick Sherwin Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1955), pp. 1–28. On Ganymede, see Karlen, pp. 22–24. For translations of lyrics that contain allusions to Ganymede, see Ernst Curtius, European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper, 1953), p. 116, and George F. Whicher, trans., The Goliard Poets: Medieval Latin Songs and Satires (New York: New Directions, 1949), pp. 97–101. For Orpheus, see John Block Friedman, Orpheus in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 8–10; Ovid's Metamorphoses x.83–84; and Jean de Meun's Roman de la rose, 11. 19651–54. For Caesar, see Dante's Purgatorio, Canto xxvi. For discussion, see Charles S. Singleton, trans., The Divine Comedy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), ii, Pt. ii, 633–36.

The sins against nature included not only sodomy between males but also homosexual contacts of all types by either sex; anal and oral intercourse, coitus interruptus, and departures from the “normal” position among heterosexuals; bestiality; and masturbation. See John Noonan, Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), p. 226.

¹³ Chaucer's conception seems identical with what is now sometimes called “true inversion,” a conjunction of cross-sex identification (i.e., feminization in males and masculinization in females) with homosexual choice of sex object. For criticism of the concept as a definition of homosexuality per se, see D. J. West, Homosexuality (Chicago: Aldine, 1967), pp. 59–62.

¹⁴ See Bailey, passim; Karlen, pp. 1–178, esp. pp. 66–103; and H. Montgomery Hyde, The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name (Boston: Little, 1970), pp. 29–57.

¹⁵ Gower's Confessio Amantis vn.4304 and Lydgate's Fall of Princes iii.1613. This usage reflects, of course, a tradition of antifeminism.

¹⁶ Le Roman de la rose, par Guillaume de Lorris et Jean de Meun, ed. Ernest Langlois (Paris: Librairie de Firmin-Didot, 1920), ii, 111–12. The translation is Charles Dahlberg's in The Romance of the Rofe by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 60–61.

¹⁷ Musa, trans., Dante's Inferno (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 127, 135.

¹⁸ Marie Delcourt, Hermaphrodite: Myths and Rites of the Bisexual Figure in Classical Antiquity, trans. Jennifer Nicholson (London: Studio Books, 1961). For modern scientific studies of hermaphroditism and ' homosexuality, see West, pp. 160–66, and John Money and Anke A. Ehrhardt, Man and Woman, Boy and Girl: The Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Conception to Maturation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1972).

¹⁹ Purity, ed. R. J. Menner (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1920), p. 31; Spearing, The Gawain-Poet: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 61–62.

Eunuchs had a recognized place in homosexual prostitution, and youths chosen as catamitic favorites were sometimes castrated. See Karlen, pp. 31, 229–33. Like effeminacy and hermaphroditism, eunuchry was sometimes thought of as creating a woman-man; see Curry, pp. 57–62, and Jean de Meun's Roman de la rose, 11. 20037–82. For modern scientific studies of eunuchry and homosexuality, see West, pp. 155–60.

²¹ Text and translation from Robert Harrison's Gallic Salt: Eighteen Fabliaux Translated from the Old French (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1974), pp. 366–69. In a paper presented to the New Chaucer Society, 21 April 1979, in Washington, D.C., Charles Muscatine argued, on the basis of similarities between the French work and the Wife of Bath's Prologue, that Chaucer knew “La Veuve” in some form, written or oral.

²² For example, the French words bougres ‘Bulgars’ (corrupted as modern English “buggers”) and herites ‘heretics’ referred interchangeably to homosexuals and heretics after the church's suppression of the Albigen-sian heresy, which was thought to have originated in Bulgaria and to have encouraged homosexuality. See Bailey, pp. 135–44. It should be noted, too, that eunuchs, though sterile, are not necessarily impotent in the sense of being unable to perform the sex act. The church defined impotence broadly, however, to include all conditions that make it impossible to deposit “true semen” in the vagina. See T. Lincoln Bous-caren, Adam C. Ellis, and Francis N. Korth, eds., Canon Law: A Text and Commentary, 4th rev. ed. (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1966). pp. 534–37.

²³ On the imagery of goats, hares, and mares, see Rowland. “Animal Imagery.”

²⁴ Summoners and pardoners sometimes worked together to defraud the faithful. See Charles R. Sleeth, “The Friendship of Chaucer's Summoner and Pardoner,” Modem Language Notes, 56 (1941 ), 138. and Arnold Williams, “Some Documents on English Pardoners 1350–1400,” in Medieval Studies in Honor of Urban Tigner Holmes, Jr., ed. John Mahoney and John Esten Keller, University of North Carolina Studies in Romance Language and Literature, No. 56 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1965), pp. 197–207. In Medieval Estates Satire, Mann claims, citing two works by Walter of Chatillôn, that institutional corruption in the church was often described metaphorically as sodomi.tical and that here as elsewhere Chaucer turns the satirist's metaphor into the attribute of individuals (p. 147). When the case for the Pardoner's homosexuality has seemed to rest solely on his association with the Summoner or even more narrowly on the possible sexual pun in “stif burdoun” (1.673), it has rightly been judged weak. For arguments in support of an intended Chaucerian pun, see D. Biggins, “Chaucer's General Prologue A673,” Notes & Queries, NS 6 (1959), 435–36, and B. H. D. Miller, “Chaucer, General Prologue A673: Further Evidence,” Notes & Queries, NS 7 (1960), 404–06; for counterarguments, see Howard, Idea, pp. 344–45.

²⁵ OED, s.v. “trow,” v., 4: “tô believe, think, be of the opinion, suppose, imagine; sometimes, to believe confidently, feel sure, be assured.” For the second sense, OED cites Piers Plowman, A.i.133: “bis I trouwe beo treube!”

²⁶ In seventh- and eighth-century penitentials, which remained in use for several centuries thereafter, homosexual acts were assigned penances of prayer and fasting comparable to those for adultery and murder. See John McNeill and Helena Gamer, eds., Medieval Handbooks of Penance (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1938). Thomas Aquinas ranked sodomy as a graver evil than heterosexual fornication, seduction, rape, or incest (Summa Theologica, 2.2.154.12). According to Noonan, Martin le Maistre, writing in the fifteenth century, was apparently the first Catholic moral theologian to suggest that homosexual inclinations might be due to sickness or biological causes (p. 357, n. 34).

²⁷ G. G. Sedgewick. “The Progress of Chaucer's Pardoner. 1880–1940,” Modern Language Quarterly, I (1940), 431–58; John Halverson, “Chaucer's Pardoner and the Progress of Criticism,” Chaucer Review, 4 (1970), 184–202; and Alfred Kellogg, “An Augustin-ian Interpretation of Chaucer's Pardoner,” Speculum, 26 (1951), 465–81.

²⁸ This synecdoche, referring to the materials from which dice were sometimes made, may well have been established usage, although neither the Middle English Dictionary nor the Oxford English Dictionary cites an occurrence antedating the Pardoner's Tale.

²⁹ In the three analogues to the Pardoner's trick cited by W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster, eds., Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1941; rpt. New York: Humanities Press, 1958), pp. 411–14, the sinners are women and the disqualifying sin is adultery. Apart from an introductory reference in one of the analogues to murders committed by both sexes, there is no mention of sins, named or unnamed, committed by men. Historically, female homosexuality has not provoked the same phobic reaction as male homosexuality. See Bailey, pp. 159–67, for sociopsychological attitudes underlying Christian

³⁰ The Parson probably has in mind a variety of “sins against nature,” since he says, “This cursednesse doon men and wommen in diverse entente and in diverse manere” (x.910). The Pardoner himself seems to echo the Parson's formula in these lines: “Allas! a foul thyng is it, by my feith, / To seye this word, and fouler is the dede” (vi.524–25). Ostensibly the subject is excessive drinking, but the remark, coming in the middle of an attack on the “wombe” ‘belly’ or ‘uterus’ (11. 521–36), may suggest that for the Pardoner it is heterosexual intercourse that is unmentionable and undoable. The Pardoner cites Paul as the source of his remarks on the “wombe,” and in Paul's epistle (1 Cor. vi. 12–20) the subject is sexual sin, not gluttony.

³¹ Alain de Lille's twelfth-century philosophical work De Planctu Naturae attacks homosexuality in the monasteries as the type of all man's perversions of nature, and in the next century, Jean de Meun has Genius, the priest of Nature, condemn homosexuality and recommend castration as punishment (11. 19636–86). The heroes of a handful of French fabliaux and romances are charged with homosexuality, but always unjustly; the reader never has to confront an actual homosexual hero. (See Gerald Herman, “The ‘Sin against Nature’ and Its Echoes in Medieval French Literature,” Animale Mediaevale, 17 [1976], 70–87.) In fourteenth-century Italy, however, Dante places some sodomites in Hell, though not in the deepest circles (Cantos xv and xvi), and others in Purgatory (Canto xxvi); and as Karl Vossler observes, Dante confronts such sins “without profound ethical abhorrence” (Mediaeval Culture: An Introduction to Dante and His Times, trans. William Cranston Lawton [New York: Ungar, 1929], ii, 263). The sudden revelation of a husband's homosexuality in Tale 6 of Day 5 of Boccaccio's Decameron, perhaps the most prominent of many references to homosexuality in the work, simply provides a climactic comic fillip for the tale. Of special interest are indications that defenses of homosexuality may have been current. Jean de Meun's Genius refers to those who read Nature's rules backward and refuse to understand their true sense (11. 19636–64). Thomas Aquinas considers and rejects several arguments to the effect that homosexuality is not a grave evil, including the argument that it causes no injury; Aquinas replies that God is injured (Summa Theologica, 2.2.154.11–12).

³² Michael Goodich, “Sodomy in Medieval Secular Law,” Journal of Homosexuality, 1 (1976), 295–302. In the thirteenth century some authorities on the Continent adopted statutes punishing homosexuality with confiscation of property, castration, or burning; but in England there was no civil law against homosexuality until 1553, and there is no record of anyone's being punished for such a crime before 1630.

³³ Chaucer's problem has been shared by all who have tried to find a specific cause for homosexuality. Recently the view has begun to prevail that the capacities for heterosexuality and homosexuality are part of man's phylogenetic inheritance and that an individual's primary adaptation to either pattern is the prpduct of a largely unconscious learning process. See Clellan S. Ford and Frank A. Beach, Patterns of Sexual Behavior (New York: Harper, 1951), passim; Wain-wright Churchill, Homosexual Behavior among Males: A Cross-Cultural and Cross-Species Investigation (New York: Hawthorn, 1967), pp. 89–120; and Money and Ehrhardt, pp. 227–35. The American Psychiatric Association struck homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses in 1974.

³⁴ This approach still reflects the official view of the Catholic church, although the church now also recognizes an “anomalous” condition of homosexuality for which the individual may not be wholly responsible. For the text of the 1975 papal statement, “Declaration on Certain Questions concerning Sexual Ethics,” see Human Sexuality: New Directions in American Catholic Thought, a Study Commissioned by the Catholic Theological Society of America, ed. Anthony Kosnik et al. (New York: Paulist Press, 1977), pp. 299–313. For criticism of the statement, see John J. McNeill, S.J., The Church and the Homosexual (Kansas City: Sheed, Andrews and McMeel, 1976), esp. pp. 10–14. The church is moving toward the idea of a special homosexual condition at a time when the sciences are moving away from it.

³⁵ Gerald R. Owst, Preaching in Medieval England: An Introduction to Sermon Manuscripts of the Period, c. 1350–1450 (1926; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), pp. 99–110, and Alfred L. Kellogg and Louis A. Haselmayer, “Chaucer's Satire of the Pardoner,” PMLA, 66 (1951), 251–77.

³⁶ I refer to the so-called crux of the Pardoner's Tale: “And Jhesu Crist, that is oure soules leche, / So graunte yow his pardoun to receyve, / For that is best; I wol yow nat deceyve” (11. 916–18). Like other parts of the Pardoner's performance, including the sermon on the tavern sins and the trick of imputing sins to the unresponsive members of his audience, this benediction has several significances. It is a traditional formula that closes the Pardoner's storytelling in a conventional way; a setup that flatters the pilgrims and softens them up for the pitch for money that follows; a deliberately confusing statement meant to complete the Pardoner's revenge against the gentlefolk; a truthful assertion that the Pardoner, while a charlatan, is no heretic; and a poignant revelation that the Pardoner still hopes for a pardon more genuine than his own or that of the institutional church: Christ's pardon. See Sedgewick, pp. 448–56, and Halverson, p. 198.

³⁷ Owst, pp. 100–01, 349–51; and Kellogg and Haselmayer, pp. 215, 228.

³⁸ In the famous Tale 10 of Day 6 of Boccaccio's Decameron, Friar Cipolla describes a fantastic pilgrimage he purportedly made to acquire relics. In his translation of The Decameron (Baltimore: Penguin, 1972), G. H. McWilliam states that the passage uses code language to describe homosexual experiences (P. 511).

³⁹ For the possibility that these lines also contain an allusion to the famous relic of Thomas à Becket's hair breeches, see Daniel Knapp. “The ‘Relyk of a Seint’: A Gloss on Chaucer's Pilgrimage,” ELH, 39 (1972), 1–26. Perhaps Chaucer is suggesting that holiness may be found in unexpected places: in an old pair of breeches or in a homosexual pardoner.

⁴⁰ Homosexuality was commonly discussed only allusively. In De Planctu Naturae Alain de Lille treats homosexuality through an elaborate allegory of grammatical terms, Dante does not name the sexual sin against nature that he treats in Cantos xv and xvi of the Inferno, and, as already noted, Boccaccio uses a code to refer to homosexuality in Tale 10 of Day 6 of his Decameron. In Contraception, Noonan traces the uses of silence and “cautious generality” in discussions of “sins against nature” in works of instruction for both priests and laity in the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries (pp. 266–74). Confessors and preachers were often warned not to be specific lest they suggest new sins to persons innocent of them.

⁴¹ Jonathan Sumption, Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), pp. 222, 249–50.