Judas desperatus The Pedagogy of Suicide in French Medieval Drama

Suicide represents a taboo in medieval thought. It is an act that endangers both the individual and the community. The corpus of late medieval French religious theater deviates from such perspective and reroutes suicide within the larger discourse of pastoral care. Through the Biblical figure of Judas theater stages what I call a true pedagogy of suicide: a way of instructing late-medieval audience about devotional practices and the manner in which they should be performed.