Papacy

The Papacy is presented as a transnational institution whose authority reaches across pilgrimage, chivalric politics, marriage, and ecclesiastical law. Although it rarely appears as a physically present body, references to the court of Rome and to the Pope give distant religious authority a decisive role in the stories’ arrangements of legitimacy, obedience, and social order.

Presence in the Pilgrims’ World

The Papacy belongs to the broad institutional landscape surrounding the Company of Canterbury Pilgrims. The Pardoner is described as having come straight from the court of Rome, a detail that places him within an international ecclesiastical network even as his personal conduct invites suspicion. His Roman connection functions as a credential: it suggests access to official religious power and helps explain how church authority can be converted into personal prestige.

The Papacy is therefore part of the same social panorama in which the pilgrims’ occupations, clothing, manners, and reputations are carefully observed. The pilgrimage does not unfold outside institutions; it carries clerical offices, legal expertise, commerce, aristocratic status, and ecclesiastical authority into the same travelling company. The court of Rome represents the highest and most distant point in that institutional hierarchy, while the Pardoner’s presence shows how its authority may be represented, displayed, or exploited by an individual.

Diplomatic and Chivalric Authority

In the story of Palamon and Arcite, religious authority is included among the forces capable of settling political and military disorder. The narrator refers to pacts, diplomacy, and mediation by the Pope, together with the support of the Church and chivalry, in connection with the destruction of idolatry. The Papacy is thus associated not merely with private devotion but with the formation of alliances and the management of collective conflict.

This reference gives the Pope a mediating position between competing kinds of power. Pacts provide contractual order, diplomacy provides negotiation, and chivalry supplies a secular code of honor; papal mediation adds ecclesiastical legitimacy to the settlement. The arrangement suggests a world in which political action becomes more authoritative when it can be expressed through several overlapping systems rather than through force alone.

The Papacy’s authority in this context is largely structural rather than theatrical. No papal scene is narrated directly, but the mention of mediation enlarges the scale of the conflict beyond the immediate decisions of individual rulers and knights. Religious power becomes part of the language through which warfare, sovereignty, and the suppression of rival worship can be justified.

The Forged Papal Bulls

The Papacy becomes most dramatically important in Walter’s tests of Griselda. When his daughter has reached the age of twelve, Walter sends a legate to the court of Rome with instructions to obtain documents that would appear to suit his purpose. The requested bulls are designed to make it seem that the Pope has ordered Walter to marry another woman if he wishes and has authorized him to leave his first wife by divorce.

The crucial fact is that Walter does not seek a genuine ecclesiastical judgment. He commands the legate to counterfeit the papal bulls. The documents imitate the form and authority of papal declarations while concealing their true origin in Walter’s private will. Papal language is therefore detached from papal decision: the appearance of an official command is manufactured so that a personal experiment can be presented as lawful necessity.

This episode exposes the vulnerability of institutional authority when it is encountered through documents, messengers, and reputation rather than through direct scrutiny. The imagined bulls carry the Pope’s name, but the action behind them belongs to Walter. Their false authority is intended to pacify the land and make his repudiation of Griselda seem procedurally legitimate. A private act of domination is dressed in the language of church law.

Marriage, Sovereignty, and Legitimacy

The forged bulls transform marriage into a field of competing jurisdictions. Walter’s marital power is already extreme, but the counterfeit documents attempt to give that power a higher sanction. By invoking the Papacy, he seeks to turn his decision from an act of personal sovereignty into an apparently valid ecclesiastical ruling.

The deception also reveals how institutions can be used to discipline the powerless. Griselda is not shown receiving an independent hearing from the Pope or the court of Rome. Instead, a supposed papal command is brought into the household as an instrument of her removal. The institutional name becomes a weapon in a domestic relationship, allowing Walter to conceal the fact that the decision originates with him.

The Papacy consequently operates in sharp contrast to Walter’s manipulation. Its imagined authority is invoked to create order, yet the false bulls produce humiliation and dispossession. The episode makes legitimacy depend not only on the form of a decree but also on its source, truthfulness, and relation to justice. A document may resemble law while functioning as coercion.

Narrative Significance

Across the book, the Papacy signifies the reach of church authority into secular life, but it also marks the danger of confusing institutional prestige with moral truth. The court of Rome can lend status to a travelling cleric, mediate conflicts that exceed individual households, and serve as the alleged source of a marital command. These different uses make the Papacy a flexible symbol of public legitimacy.

Its most revealing appearance is the forged bulls, where authority is present as an imitation. Walter’s lie succeeds because papal power is recognizable and socially consequential even when the Pope himself is absent. The episode therefore distinguishes between authority as a visible form and authority as an accountable judgment. The Papacy stands for the latter, while Walter exploits only the former.

The institution’s narrative role is thus double. It belongs to the moral and political order that characters appeal to when they seek settlement, recognition, or lawful standing; at the same time, its prestige can be appropriated by corrupt or coercive actors. Through that tension, the Papacy helps the book examine how religious authority governs society, how it travels through representatives and texts, and how easily its outward signs can be made to serve a private will.