We are perhaps so used to thinking, with the older historical critics, of the Pardoner as an embodiment of the notorious abuses of the fourteenth-century church that we tend not to consider that he has attitudes towards them--as well he might, for who should know them better?

What the Pardoner is making fun of is the way the putative transcendence of the institutions of the church is continually reduced to a set of merely human practices. His disenchantment thus makes him a proponent of the older historical view of the tale as a satire on the corruption of the clergy. The satire is the Pardoner's, and his own best example is himself.

He has nothing but contempt, a deeper sense of contempt than we have yet examined, for the consolations of religion, but he takes very seriously the things they are intended to console.

H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the CT (California, 1990), 42-43

Even though the Host's and the Pardoner's kiss ostensibly functions as the end point in a series of attempts to define the Pardoner as absolute other, it also underscores the continuing proximity of the Pardoner and shows how his efforts to assert identity--his transgressive desire--mirrors ours....Instead the kiss--that moment when we are forced to "touch" the Pardoner--extends the resistance to categorization and control initiated by the Pardoner's body, holding up for analysis the constructions of masculinity and meaning that are taking place within this time and place.

The Parson-like intervention of the Knight (representative of the larger order of disciplinary care), instead of being at odds with the Host, simply "turns down the volume" enough so that the Host cannot be heard to utter that which must not be uttered, the "open secret" of the disciplinary pact: the apparent opposites private/public or material/spiritual are in fact necessary co-agents in maintaining the status quo.

What is transgressive about the Pardoner, what provokes the violent responses of his audience, is precisely that way in which he is not the other, most obviously the way that the cupidity his audience attempts to fix in him alone actually fuels the discursive economy of the dominant culture.

Glen Burger, "Kissing the Pardoner," PMLA 107 (1992), 1145, 1148

And the Pardoner knows that the pilgrims desire wholeness: when he interrupts the Wife of Bath to claim that he was about to wed a wife, when he later proclaims in his Prologue, that he wants a jolly wench in every town, he is not simply trying to enter the heterosexual world of the pilgrims; he is cannily playing on their desire to believe in the integrity of the body, their desire to believe in the integrity of his body, and of their own pilgrim body. He is exploiting their fetishistic ability to admit his oddity even while they refuse the practical consequences of their admission. They know (that he is sexually weird), but even so (they demand a "moral thyng" from him). Their desire for an edifying tale is well described by this fetishistic logic: even out of the mouth of a ribald figure they insist that it will be a "moral thyng"'; even though it is fiction, they will find it true. Fiction is not just for "lewed peple" to "holde" onto (438); it is for everyone, a partial object par excellence. Made of flawed language, fiction is not literally true, we know, but it plays on our desire for truth.

Carolyn Dinshaw, “Eunuch Hermeneutics,” ELH 55 (1988): 42

But the tale's conclusion can be read less reassuringly for the heterosexual project of signification and for the security of heterosexual self-definition over against the (homophobically constructed) medieval idea of male homosexuality, and it is such a reading that I most wish to advance here. If the Pardoner's danger lies largely in his ability to confound proper procedures of signification and interpretation, then the Host's response--especially in its rejection of any allegorical or spiritual reading of the Pardoner's performance- -testifies to the Pardoner's continuing power. In his attack on the Pardoner, the Host in fact could not stand farther from Christian spirituality, and he here fully involves himself in the debased physical world presented by the Pardoner as his own. . . The angry language here strongly connects the Host to his "angry" opponent, involving itself in the physical debasement of the Pardoner's false relics and queer body even as it rejects these. The Host's language is violent, but, like the language of the rioters in the tale's exemplum, it evokes the sexual: "kisse thyn olde breech," "I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hand," "I wol no lenger pleye/ With thee." Though reduced to silence, the Pardoner here perhaps gains a certain kind of victory. In the Host's revulsion, in what we might read as a moment of homosexual panic, the Host is drawn strongly away from the spiritual and strongly into the circle of the Pardoner's body.

Stephen F. Kruger, “Claiming the Pardoner:Toward a Gay Reading of Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale,” Exemplaria 6 (1994): 113-39.

While some of his customers may have been naive Christians who could not appreciate the difference, others must have hoped to buy spiritual safety dishonestly, without reforming their lives. By exploiting the potential for self-deceit in those he imagines condemn him, the Pardoner attempts to convict his customers of being themselves "envoluped in synne." As he leads them away from the legitimate sacrament, it is as if he were saying, "If I cannot be truly forgiven, neither shall they be." At the same time, the Pardoner constantly enacts in reverse the scene of absolution he longs for. As he dispenses his own brand of absolution, often arousing in his audience true contrition (vl.430-31), it is as if he were saying, "If there is anyone the church will not forgive, I will forgive him," all the while hoping that the forgiveness he dispenses will magically flow back to cleanse himself.

This manipulation of the sacrament is one of the things the Pardoner does that tend to be obscured by what he says as he constructs a smoke screen of single-minded avarice. But his intimate association with confession betrays, beneath his practiced cynicism, the seriousness with which he regards the sacrament. Apparently he does not allow himself the easy out he offers others the chance to buy forgiveness and satisfaction with money or specific good works. For himself the Pardoner requires true contrition, true purpose of amendment; he does believe that Christ's pardon is best.

Monica McAlpine, “The Pardoner's Homosexuality and How It Matters,” PMLA 95 (Jan., 1980): 16

In both [the Clerk’s and Physician’s] tales, most of Chaucer's changes in his sources assure that we will be uneasy, that we will not be able to suspend our disbelief entirely, and forget a world of wider and more emotionally complex choices than the source tale offers, and its Canterbury narrator advocates. In the Physician's Tale, as in the Canterbury Tales generally, Chaucer encourages us to examine, define, and redefine ethical abstractions that are treated as given in his originals or regarded as unexamined moral categories by their Canterbury narrators: concepts such as "gentilesse," "fredom," "innocence," "auctoritee." Instead of firmly defining these moral categories by exemplary action, and recommending them as imperatives to an audience, Chaucer places them within quotation marks, and chips away at their solidity by reminding us of the speaker's self-interest, inconsistency, or imaginative blindness: In the Canterbury Tales, ethical terms are not hypostatized and set in motion, as in some allegories; they become sets of emphases in somebody's scheme of things.

The literary limits of the exemplum are themselves held up for inspection by the reader. Typically in the Canterbury Tales the story is what its teller claims it is, but offers us in addition the literary material and emotional autonomy to place it within other contexts as well, and Chaucer invites our inspection of all of them. This cross-graining of originally smooth and unambiguous story material is perhaps the most universal operation Chaucer performs upon his sources. The Physician's Tale provokes consideration of its major moral categories through characters who act in recognizable generic patterns that do not add up to a single overarching system.

Anne Middleton, “The Physician's Tale and Love's Martyrs: ‘Ensamples Mo than Ten’ as a Method in the Canterbury Tales," Chaucer Review, 8 (1973): 15, 26