The Summoner is another supposedly devout religious figure who is actually a hypocrite. In medieval society, summoners brought people to the ecclesiastical court to confess their sins. He has a disgusting skin disease that makes his face pimpled and scaly. His outside appearance matches his inner corruption: he is very willing to be bribed in exchanged for a full pardon.
The Summoner Quotes in The Canterbury Tales
The The Canterbury Tales quotes below are all either spoken by The Summoner or refer to The Summoner. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Get the entire The Canterbury Tales LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Summoner Character Timeline in The Canterbury Tales
The timeline below shows where the character The Summoner appears in The Canterbury Tales. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
The General Prologue
The rest of the company is a Reeve, a Miller, a Summoner, a Pardoner, a Manciple, and the narrator himself: besides these, “ther were namo.”
(full context)
The Summoner has a disease that makes his face bright red and pimpled, gives him scaly skin,...
(full context)
The Summoner also knows how to swindle people. If a man’s soul is in his purse, he...
(full context)
The Wife of Bath’s Prologue
...Friar interrupts the Wife of Bath’s prologue to complain about its length. He and the Summoner begin to quarrel. The Friar starts to tell a nasty tale about summoners, but the...
(full context)
