Judas hermeneutics: Literary character and reading in revolt

Abstract

Medieval studies has an identification problem. Scholars are assumed to hold an interest in the period because of the ways in which they may identify with their materials, which has sedimented ‘medievalist’ into an identity category and continues to work against efforts to build coalitions across divisions of periodization and field. Drawing on the formulations of queer, BIWOC, and feminist theorists, this paper suggests disidentification as an alternative mode of engagement with the medieval, one that employs the distance between the reader and the text as the critical tool with which to enter into conversation with medieval cultural productions. I use the term ‘Judas hermeneutics’ to group together various interpretive orientations that specifically achieve the work of disidentification; as one example, I offer a character studies-based close reading of the figure of Judas Iscariot in the N-Town Passion Plays to show how its elisions of time and consequence embed into the narrative an axiomatic thought – the exegetical precondition of Judas’s damnation – which remains invisible to a point of view residing within the text. Disidentification, I argue, enables critical observations like these by making explicit the fact that we are not the things we study – nor should we wish to be.