Judas’ Death: Some Remarks Concerning the Iconography of Suicide in the Middle Ages

This essay analyses some medieval images representing the Biblical story of Judas’ suicide. From a historian’s viewpoint, those images must be seen in the context of a scholastic discourse on mortal sins & human responsibility. A central aspect of the argument presented in this paper is the hanging tree as a number of pictures indicate a significant transformation of this motif. The former tree is replaced by a representation of gallows, something that the author argues reflects a corresponding revaluation of Judas’ death within the scholastic discourse. (28 refs.)