DR FELICITY HARLEY McGOWAN
Research Fellow, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne

HANGING BY A THREAD: JUDAS' SUICIDE IN EARLY MEDIEVAL ART

While suicide was at times respected or admired in the ancient world, hanging as a method of voluntary death was generally reviled. Evidence suggests it was frequent among the Greeks and Romans, yet it was associated with the poor, and particularly women. It was thus maligned as a choice of death and the associated shame might account for the rarity of extant pictorial references to it in Greco-Roman art. The iconographic lineage of the image of Judas Iscariot hanging himself is therefore difficult to trace.

Both accounts of Judas' death in the New Testament, in Matthew and Acts, differ as to how he died but agree in suggesting that as a traitor he met a bad end. While in later medieval art the two literary traditions are often merged to form a single narrative type, the earliest surviving visual references to Judas' death directly and consistently favour the Matthean version, recalling the death of the Old Testament traitor Achitophel who hanged himself. As a subject for depiction, Judas' hanging appears relatively late in the development of Christian art and after its introduction in the fourth century was swiftly instated as a powerful pictorial trope of betrayal in medieval visual culture. As it thus appears across the medieval period, the iconography has been interpreted largely on the basis of post-Augustinian polemics which condemn voluntary death per se and see Judas as having increased rather than atoned for guilt by killing himself.

Focusing on the earliest pictorial evidence for the representation of Judas hanging himself, this paper will submit that recognition of and closer attention to the early Christian visual tradition reveals the way in which such an interpretation is misplaced for images produced before the fifth century at least. Prior to this date, the image appears to have stood as motif not of sin and betrayal, but of remorse. In exploring this point, the diversity of the iconography's visual and literary heritage will be examined. Various social, legal, theological and artistic influences will be seen to have interacted to prompt the birth of an underestimated image in early Christianity and so it will be argued that a richer understanding of the iconography in its formative pictorial contexts yields important insights into the reading of a powerful symbol both of remorse and betrayal in medieval art and culture.

DR PAMELA O'NEILL
University of Sydney

FROM PATCHWORK TO TAPESTRY: METHODOLOGIES AND MATERIALS FOR UNDERSTANDING THE EARLY MEDIEVAL

This paper visits theories, methodologies and source materials from sociology, archaeology, literature and law to discuss ways of understanding the transformation of the early medieval social fabric from a patchwork of subsistence groups to a tapestry of specialised individuals and classes. The paper focuses on the Gaelic and Anglo-Saxon areas of the British Isles to enquire into the nature of the complex developments that took place across early medieval societies. In Gaelic Scotland and Ireland, the opening of the fifth century, where society was made up of undifferentiated petty kingdoms with little or no economic specialisation, can be contrasted with say the ninth century, where largely centralised control of the means of production, complex political systems and self-conscious legal systems had become the norm. In England, a similar contrast can be drawn between the earlier years of Anglo-Saxon settlement, characterised by small self-contained social units, and the time of Aethelstan (putative first king of England) with its codified laws, national political organisation and monetary currency. This paper will seek to demonstrate ways in which an understanding of the causal dynamics of social development in the intervening centuries can be advanced using interdisciplinary perspectives.

DR CAROL WILLIAMS
Monash University

GATHERING THE THREADS FROM PYTHAGORAS TO GUIDO: A TAXONOMY OF MUSICA

The central text for the study of the quadrivial discipline called musica in the early middle ages was Boethius's De institutione musica. Using this text as a starting point and looking backwards and forwards from the early 6th century covering a time span from the early Greek musical theorists, including Pythagoras and Aristoxenus to the early 11th century Guido of Arezzo, the aim will be to gather up the threads of ongoing influence. Throughout the modern study of /musica/ these threads are often articulated as opposing antagonists as in for example /musicus/ versus cantor, /musica theorica/ versus /musica practica/ and speculation versus demonstration. The examination of these oppositions provides illuminating insights into the taxonomy of a music theory which connects the ancient world with that of the early middle ages.