Article

Judas hermeneutics: Literary

character and reading in revolt

Mariah Junglan Min

University of Pennsylvania College of Liberal and Professional Studies, Philadelphia, PA,
USA.
Department of English, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA, USA.

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 specifi-
cally 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.
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2020) 11, 476–483.
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00201-9

People assume that medievalists like to identify with their subject matter. That
is, medievalists are expected – by medievalists and non-medievalists alike – to
encounter in the Middle Ages something that is part of their own self-identity,

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 Judas hermeneutics

and to derive pleasure from this recognition. From a presenter at the

International Congress on Medieval Studies asserting, ‘We’re medievalists.
Who among us did not grow up reading and loving Tolkien?’ to a work of
scholarship calling Late Antique theologians ‘our ancestors’ (Borgehammar,
1991, 163), it seems par for the course that a medievalist should be able to stare
into the pellucid waters of the Middle Ages to find their personal past looking
warmly back at them. Several decades after Lee Patterson wrote that ‘the
isolation of medievalism from the mainstream of Anglo-American literary
studies’ was relegating medieval studies to ‘irrelevance’ and ‘increasingly
dessicated [sic] erudition’ (Patterson, 1987, 38), it is still largely a secluded
discipline, whose exile is as self-imposed as it is unquestioned. No one
understands us, so goes the familiar sentiment, except for ourselves and the
materials we study. I too have trafficked in this ‘we few, we happy because few’
language before to describe the field, but this stance is ultimately inextricable
from the desire to protect whiteness and its cultural products. It encourages a
turning inward, a defensiveness coiled tightly around the Middle Ages at the
expense of building coalitions of knowledge and support across divisions of
periodization and field.
Inhabiting a current moment that is rife with white supremacist appropria-
tions of the Middle Ages, liberally inclined medievalists have the easy option of
relegating overidentification to the exclusive province of the alt-right. But as a
counterargument to appropriation, pointing out that medieval Western Europe
was not racially homogenous is a protective move that preserves the Middle
Ages as something still worthy of being loved, since the response is not so much
addressed at white supremacists as it is meant to reassure other observers.
Insofar as it is intended to foster inclusivity in the present – for example, to
demonstrate to scholars of color that they have a place in medieval studies – it
unfortunately cannot help but fall short of the goal. Who, precisely, is doing the
demonstrating in the above scenario? A welcoming gatekeeper is still a
gatekeeper; this performance of benevolence still upholds the white supremacy
which, in its more visible manifestations, adjudicates which bodies are allowed
to belong in the field and which are not. What all this does not do is question the
assumption that a pleasure of identification must underlie an interest in the
Middle Ages.
Geraldine Heng has spoken about the disparity in reception between her
pioneering scholarship on the Global Middle Ages and on medieval race (Heng,
2019). Whereas the former was readily lauded, the latter took a while to gain a
foothold in medieval studies at large; The Invention of Race in the European
Middle Ages (Heng, 2018) has certainly jolted the field to attention, but charges
of anachronism and insufficient historicization have long hounded (and still do
so) the study of medieval race. Heng has demonstrated that race was indeed an
active mechanism for categorization in the Middle Ages, but truth value aside,
the rhetoric at work in the resistance to her formulations is telling. By calling

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upon the need for rigor in terminology, or by warning against ways of thinking
that are deemed ahistorical, this omnipresent murmur of disapproval seeks to
herd modern scholars into medieval readerly positions. We remain ‘anxious as
hell about anachronism’ (Johnston and Mueller, 2016). This anxiety demands
that we strive to reproduce the viewpoint of the medieval text in our scholarly
practices, to read as a rapt medieval subject, as a good medievalist who hears
themselves hailed by their archive.
It also creates a double bind for any scholar who does not see themselves
reflected back in the source materials, or sees only warped images of themselves
that have been distorted by ideologies of hate. On the one hand, you are told it is
a betrayal to study a thing that ignores you or loathes you; on the other hand,
you are told that your inability to fully relate to the Middle Ages prevents you
from modeling responsible scholarly behavior. This is the lose-lose quandary of
the minority scholar. So what if we severed this Gordian knot? What if we made
space for dis-identification as not only a valid but a prevalent mode of
engagement with the medieval?
This would not be the first time distance has been pursued in literary studies.
Rita Felski identifies ‘distance rather than closeness’ as one of the paradigmatic
qualities of suspicious reading, requiring from the critic a ‘muted affective state’
(Felski, 2012, n.p.). A certain amount of distance between the critic and the text
is thus endemic to the modern critical project, rendering it the status quo against
which are issued discernible calls to bridge that gap, in particular calls to
abandon the posture of affective detachment. A prominent example is Eve
Sedgwick’s proposal for practices of ‘reparative reading’ (Sedgwick, 2003, 124),
oriented around the ‘motive of seeking pleasure’ (Sedgwick, 2003, 138). In
medieval studies, Carolyn Dinshaw memorably describes the desire for a ‘touch
across time’ (Dinshaw, 1999, 21) fueled by a ‘queer historical impulse’
(Dinshaw, 1999, 1) that joins the now of the reader with the then of the
Middle Ages. This mirrors L.O. Aranye Fradenburg’s emphasis on ‘the
importance of passion to rigorous practices of knowledge’ (Fradenburg, 1997,
209) and her recommendation that medievalist scholars ‘would do well to teach
and write more explicitly about enjoyment’ (Fradenburg, 1997, 208).
But in asking us to consider disidentification as a mode of engagement, I do
not refer to Felski’s ‘muted affective state’ nor to Fradenburg’s ‘alteritist
equation of history with discontinuity’ (Fradenburg, 1997, 212). What I ask for
is a kind of disidentification that echoes BIWOC auto-ethnographical method-
ologies, in which some distance from the object – even when the object is
yourself – is fundamental to the process of understanding it. As Zora Neale
Hurston describes her adolescent relationship to black folklore in a pioneering
and indelible formulation: ‘I couldn’t see it for wearing it’ (Hurston, [1935]
1978, 1). The metaphor of stepping away in order to see, it is worth noting,
acknowledges in its materiality both the intimacy and the situatedness of the
knowledge that is produced. Hurston’s folkloric chemise is placed away from

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her and seen through her eyes. However, my notion of disidentification must
depart from this intellectual tradition insomuch as medieval studies is not an
auto- discipline1; that is, disidentification depends on recognizing that this 1 I contend that we
chemise does not belong to anyone in particular. must understand
medieval studies as
In addition, the aforementioned invocations of closeness – Sedgwick,
distinct from
Fradenburg, and Dinshaw – do distinguish between intimacy and identification. heritage work, and
Fradenburg writes of her terms, ‘intimacy does not mean sameness[; . . .] it that equating
makes war as often as it makes love’ (Fradenburg, 1997, 220). Dinshaw specifies medieval studies
with auto-
that her interest lies in ‘partial connections’ (Dinshaw, 1999, 35), reaching out
ethnography
to ‘past figures who elude resemblance to us’ (Dinshaw, 1999, 39) as just one collapses that
method of seeking pleasure in history. Sedgwick, too, is well alive to the difference. This
‘powerful reparative practices that [. . .] infuse self-avowedly paranoid critical does not negate
projects’ and ‘the paranoid exigencies that are often necessary for nonparanoid that auto-
ethnography is a
knowing and utterance’ (Dinshaw, 1999, 129). As Heather Love puts it, valuable and
‘Sedgwick taught me to let the affect in, but it’s clear that by doing so I won’t powerful approach
only be letting the sunshine in’ (Love, 2010, 239). I ask for the chance to be for medieval
disidentified, not to be disaffected. studies; see
Rajabzadeh (2019)
The term disidentification here is indebted to – but in contradistinction to – for a recent
the concept of disidentification as proposed by José Esteban Muñoz. Disiden- example.
tification in Muñoz’s work is ‘descriptive of the survival strategies the minority
subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere’
(Muñoz, 1999, 4). Rather than categorically reject a phobic object, the
disidentifying subject ‘works to hold on to this object and invest it with new life’
(Muñoz, 1999, 12). In terms of medieval studies, these would be survival
strategies used by minority scholars to continue to participate in medieval
studies while still recognizing that the field has been historically hostile towards
them. But disidentification as I call for it here has an element of the prescriptive,
not only the descriptive approach Muñoz takes; and I address medieval studies
as a whole, not merely its minority scholars. Muñoz writes, ‘Our charge as
spectators and actors is to continue disidentifying with this world until we
achieve new ones’ (Muñoz, 1999, 200). The disidentification I suggest builds on
Muñoz’s, in that I intend for it to be one concrete step towards achieving a new
medieval studies.
Which brings us to the need for Judas hermeneutics. I use this phrase loosely
(and somewhat facetiously, but truthfully) to gesture toward a complex of
deliberate and vigorous methods of reading that disidentify the modern scholar
from the ideological frameworks of the medieval text. These are not unknown
methods waiting to be invented. Rather, I address a range of frameworks –
critical race theory, queer methodologies, and disability studies, just to name a
few, but really any interpretive orientation that strives for this end – under the
umbrella heading of ‘Judas hermeneutics’ to highlight the specific work of
disidentification that they collectively achieve. These approaches are vital not
only for what explicatory capacities they may have, but for their power to

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disidentify without isolating the reader from the text, to distance without
deadening. These methods ask: What can be achieved by betraying a text that
assumes we belong to it fully? What might Jerusalem look like from the outskirts
of town? How can we read as an act of compelling, generative revolt?
The character of Judas Iscariot himself, as a textual locus, also often functions
as a microcosm of what ideology elides. My own scholarship prods apart
medieval literary characters to explore how they have been constructed, and
how the seeming cohesion of character is – upon closer examination – usually
bursting at the seams with intricate technologies of characterization that are
deployed for specific ends. The Judas of the N-Town Passion Plays, for example,
is placed in uncertain temporal relation to his betrayal of Jesus. At the Last
Supper, Jesus foretells his imminent demise: ‘On of yow here syttynge, my treson
shal tras; / On of yow is besy, my deth here to dyth’ (N-Town, 2007,
27.209–10). Following the account of the Gospels, the Apostles then begin to
wonder who Jesus is referring to. Each of the twelve is given the space of a
quatrain to express his astonishment and outrage. At first glance the section
might seem a tad repetitive, the tenor of the Apostles’ speeches consistent from
Peter’s ‘Whiche of us ys he that treson shal do?’ (214) to Jude’s ‘I woundyr ryght
sore who that he shuld be’ (253), or even to Judas’s ‘Which of us all here, that
traytour may be?’ (263)
But in context, the progression of Peter’s questions makes an unsettling leap of
logic:
JHESUS On of my bretheryn shal werke this manas;
On of yow here syttynge, my treson shal tras;
On of yow is besy, my deth here to dyth.
And yitt was I nevyr in no synful plas
Wherefore my deth shuld so shamfully be pyght.
PETRUS My dere Lord, I pray thee, the trewth for to telle:
Whiche of us ys he that treson shal do?
Whatt traytour is he that his Lord that wold selle?
Expresse his name, Lord, that shal werke this woo. (208–16)
At no point before Peter’s mention of it is there any indication in the text that
the betrayal of Jesus will involve him being sold. The next Apostle to bring up
the specific method of betrayal is Matthew, who asks, ‘what man is so wood /
For gold or for sylvyr hymself so to spylle’ (229–30). If any vagueness in Peter’s
use of ‘selle’ could have allowed the word to be written off as a metaphor,
Matthew removes that possibility by making explicit the material nature of the
sale. By the time Philip has his turn, the question has become, ‘A, Lord, who is
that wyll chaffare thee for monay?’ (239); the action described is very much a
commercial exchange, commodity for currency. The Apostles make continual
references to the particulars of a future event that they have neither experienced

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nor had described to them. The knowledge that Jesus will be sold off in a
financial transaction creeps into their speech piece by piece – with none of the
revelatory momentum of prophecy, but in slow fragments, like a returning
memory.
Even Judas himself and the conspirators exist in this indistinct temporal frame
that encourages slippages between the present and the future. ‘Now cowntyr-
fetyd, I have a prevy treson, / My maysterys power for to felle’ (269–70), says
Judas in a soliloquy when he rises from the meal to make his way to the council
house. The implication is that he has hatched this plot relatively recently, which
would be in line with his later ‘I wyl go tellyn hem myn entent; / I trow ful mery I
shal hem make’ (279–80) and the ‘Heyl, prynsesse and prestys that ben present! /
New tydyngys to yow I come to telle’ (285–86) he extends as a greeting when he
has crossed the playing field. Yet Gamaliel is already acquainted with him;
‘Now, welcome, Judas, oure owyn frende!’ (293) is the first thing he says to
Judas, which may merely be shorthand for the connection of ill will that binds
Judas to the other conspirators, but is still a far cry from the 77 lines of
explanation, argument, and abuse it takes for the York Judas just to be allowed
in past the janitor.
There is a kind of stasis that results from only ever doing what you will have
done, being what you are and always will be. The N-Town Judas is pinned in
place. Perversely enough, it is precisely because of N-Town’s emphasis on the
availability of mercy that Judas must be damned from the moment he walks
onstage; to allow that mercy to extend to him threatens to destabilize the
narrative of Christian history. Mary Magdalene bursts into the scene of the Last
Supper to implore Jesus to cleanse her of her past sins, an event unique to
N-Town among surviving English dramatic texts. Significantly, her redemption
is figured in terms of a movement between two distinct points of enclosure; as a
sinner she is ‘closyd all in care’ (141) and ‘wrappyd in wo’ (142), caught in the
claustrophobic grasp of ‘the fendys brace’ (184). After Jesus has cast the seven
devils out of her, she describes herself as being ‘in thy grett mercy, closyd and
shytt’ (185), and adds, ‘I shal nevyr returne to synful trace / That shulde me
dampne to hell pytt’ (186–7). Mercy works through moving someone from the
inertness of sin to the restfulness of salvation.
But when the same shytt-pytt rhyme pair surfaces again later in the play, the
Apostle Thomas is using it to condemn the traitor whose identity is as yet
unknown: ‘For his fals treson, the fendys so blake / Shal bere his sowle depe
down into helle pytt. / Resste shal he non have, but evyrmore wake, / Brennyng
in hoot fyre, in preson evyr shytt’ (249–52). The fate that the Apostles imagine
for the traitor is invariably hell. When the possibility of grace is acknowledged at
last by Thaddeus, the last Apostle to speak, it is held out only to be explicitly
denied: ‘Alas, he is lorn; ther may no grace be’ (255). For Judas, the gates have
already been closed and barred.

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The play knows what Judas does because the Middle Ages knows; it knows that
Judas is damned because the Middle Ages remembers it as an exegetical
precondition. What goes unsaid in N-Town is the making of that awareness, the
process through which something known becomes known. To ask why Judas is
relegated to stasis in N-Town – to make visible the elisions of time and
consequence that construct this stasis – is to use character studies as one form of
Judas hermeneutics, distancing ourselves from the theological frameworks within
which the text operates. Ultimately, N-Town does not so much dramatize a
biblical narrative as it stages an extended meditation on a foregone conclusion. To
regard the play from a point of view residing within it – a Christian perspective
that takes the culpability of Judas for granted – prevents us from being able to
trace how axiomatic thought manifests itself in literary form. This is one way to
read in revolt; by disidentifying ourselves from that internal perspective, we can
see how character becomes a site for the reproduction of the ideological
commitments of the text. Disidentification, then, neither desensitizes us to what
draws us to our texts, nor does it demand that we find other texts altogether.
Rather, it reminds us: We are not the things we study, nor should we wish to be.
Eleven years ago, before I even knew what the Middle Ages was, a senior
scholar of color asked if I might consider becoming a medievalist someday. He
was one. I told him, probably not: I don’t think I know what I’m meant to see in
medieval literature. He said, You will, which I took at the time to mean that he
had found something to identify with in his archive, something that made him
feel at home because of the way it resembled him. Maybe that really was what
he meant. By the time I did become a medievalist and thought to ask him, it was
too late. But there was always another way to encounter the medieval, not
through resemblance but through difference: to revel in the ill fit between
yourself and the disciplinary coat you wear, the sheer miracle of knowing
yourself through what is outside of you. When I reach across time, I can feel
what is there because of the skin that separates me from it.

About the Author

Mariah Junglan Min (she, her, hers) is a lecturer at the University of

Pennsylvania College of Liberal and Professional Studies and at Bryn Mawr
College. She received her PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania in
2019. Her first book project, Figure Writing: Technologies of Character in
Medieval Literature, argues that attending to medieval literary characters can
help reframe characterization as a tactic deployed by the text, rather than an
unmediated reflection of human subjectivity (E-mail: mariahjmin@gmail.com).

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