Apocrypha and Fictionality

Abstract

Perhaps the greatest benefit of Catherine Gallagher's claims about fictionality for scholars of premodern literature is that her work has sparked critical reassessments of fictionality long before the eighteenth century.1 Since scholars like Monika Fludernik, Julie Orlemanski, and Michelle Karnes have recently retheorized such concepts in relation to premodern literature, scholars now have new starting points for inquiry.2 The following reflections come out of two starting points raised by these pieces: first, Orlemanski's question, "What genres or text-types maintain an unstable relation to fictionality?" (WHF 162); and, second, Karnes's claim that "medieval readers were not jurists, tasked with the separation of truth from falsehood, but were capable of enjoying indeterminacy and maximizing the boundaries of possibility."3 Considering biblical apocrypha provides a way to bring these notions together and to explore issues concerning premodern fictionality, since premodern sources reveal a prevalent "explicit and ongoing discourse of fictionality" around this text-type.4 Biblical apocrypha possess a particularly tense relationship with fictionality, demonstrate the joy of indeterminacy for readers, and challenge modern epistemological assumptions of literary study.