Entertainment / Literature / Pardoner: An individual licensed by the medieval church to sell papal indulgences (i.e., 'pardons'), official documents excusing the recipient from certain acts of penitence and alleviating the sinner's punishment while in purgatory. The Catholic Encyclopedia defines an indulgence as 'the extra-sacramental remission of the temporal punishment due' to a sinner. Protestant students might wish to peruse the Catholic Encyclopedia's discussion of indulgences to avoid common misconceptions and distortions. The practice of selling these pardons as a means of fund-raising for the church or as a means of rewarding those who offered the church some service rose in prominence after the council of Clermont in 1095. There, Pope Urban II announced sweeping indulgences would be given to any individuals willing to go on Crusade. By the fourteenth century, the practice had developed extensively, and pardoners were lay officials authorized by the pope to sell indulgences in exchange for financial donations. Ecclesiastical abuses become commonplace problems. These abuses included unauthorized sales, the sale of forged pardons, extortion, and deliberate misrepresentation of the scope of an indulgence (i.e., treating the indulgence as a 'get-out-of-hell-free' card). Chaucer's Pardoner in The Canterbury Tales represents the worst excesses of pardoners during this period.
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