The Pardoner’s Passing and How It Matters Gender, Relics and Speech Acts Alex da Costa Abstract This article looks again at the fgure of the Pardoner in the Canterbury Tales and reconsiders the possibility that ‘he’ is a woman passing as a man. The importance of such a reading is revealed by exploring the anxieties this raises over the relationship between outward appearance and inner substance or reality, and demonstrating parallels with medieval anxieties over the authenticity of relics and the validity of religious speech acts, including those involved in the transubstantiation of the elements of the Eucharist. Keywords: gender, oaths, Pardoner, relics, speech acts, transubstantiation thise cookes, how they stampe, and streyne, and grynde, and turnen substaunce into accident… —’Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale’, ll. 538–539 The question of what is ‘accident’ and what is ‘substaunce’ whispers through the ‘Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale’. Anxieties about the capacity for outward appearance or declaration to depart from underlying reality cluster around the fgure of the Pardoner, relics and oaths. ‘Chaucer’, the narrator, invites the reader to suspect that the Pardoner’s clothes conceal an anomalous body in the General Prologue; the Pardoner teases his pilgrim audience with the thought that his (and others’) gaudily displayed relics are mere animal bones; and greed makes a mockery of the idea that the three rioters’ fraternal oaths create a lasting bond between them. Chaucer’s audience is repeatedly put in a position where they must doubt what is presented or promised, even as others continue gaily to trust. The narrator questions the Pardoner’s gender as an aside to the audience rather than voicing his doubt to © Critical Survey doi:10.3167/cs.2017.290304 • Vol. 29 No. 3, Winter 2017: 27–47