Damned If You Do: Judas Iscariot And The Invention Of Medieval Literary Character

This project explores medieval literature as a site to disentangle the longstanding critical conflation of character and psychology. I use the figure of Judas Iscariot as a case study to argue that the seeming incoherence of medieval characters can reframe characterization as a tactic deployed by the text, rather than an unmediated reflection of human subjectivity.