"Substaunce Into Accident": Transubstantiation and Relics in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale

ABSTRACT:This article focuses on the "substaunce into accident" trope in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale. In the major critical editions, there is no cohesion among glosses of the trope and its philosophical terms. This has yielded mistaken interpretations of the trope and mis-readings of the Tale, most particularly the trope's relation to a supposed joke about transubstantiation and Wycliffite Eucharistic controversies. The most powerful and influential argument for an allusion to Eucharistic controversy is made in Paul Strohm's article "Chaucer's Lollard Joke." I aim to dismantle this reading, which has been cited often in subsequent criticism, in order to clear space for a fresh interpretation of the trope's relevance to the Pardoner and his Tale. To this end, I present a critique of Strohm's thesis by focusing on the Aristotelian idiom of Scholastic philosophy and the precise application of that terminology to an account of transubstantiation; and in the second half of the article, I develop a new reading of the trope in the context of the Pardoner's faking of relics. The Pardoner capitalizes on the indistinguishable difference between the accidental qualities of a true and fake relic. Like the cooks in his denunciation of gluttony, he turns substance into accident. Ironically, nonetheless, just as his rhetoric causes good outcomes despite his vicious intentions, so too does his faking of relics potentially turn an assemblage of accidents into the substance of true faith.