ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the outstanding characteristic of Chaucer's imagination in relation to knowledge and authority, its reflexivity. Chaucer's works contain many examples of the de-sublimation of reified discourse, retrieving the specific human speakers who have become occluded, but there is one particularly concerned with exegesis which the author would like to mention. It is typical of Chaucer's procedures that a Biblical text used by authorities as an important exegetical rule is made decidedly tricky. St Paul's statement that the letter kills but the spirit gives life had been wrenched out of its context and appropriated by exegetes in defence of traditional allegorizing practices. In fact, like Langland's work, the subtly reflexive speech given to the Pardoner opens out on to profound contradictions and anomalies in the theory and practice of the orthodox church. After the Pardoner has practised the art which is part of his 'auctoritee', he completes his performance by acting out his official calling as a licensed Pardoner.
