I came to Karma Lochrie's Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy as an historian of the Early Middle Ages with an interest in medieval secrets. The book will doubtless receive many fine reviews from literary experts, from scholars with a special interest in and knowledge of medieval vernacular literature and the sexual politics of the later Middle Ages as viewed through selected literary constructions. But historians with their neo-positivist leanings (inasmuch as we admit the existence of facts or, at least, spend a good deal of time searching for and weighing their factuality) often demur in the face of attempts to read the past primarily through literature or to bend the past too exclusively to the task of explicating it.
The title of Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy promises more than the book can possibly deliver. We live in an age of pregnant titles, those 'coloned' creations that attract us first with an arresting and elegant main title before descending to the actual content as specified by the subtitle, 'what the book is really about'. Every age has had its own titular tastes. Gone are the capacious titles of sixteenth and seventeenth-century studies that filled title pages with sentence-long streams of words. Nineteenth-century scholarly book titles were still long and specific, but a great and gradual trimming had set in, until now at the end of twentieth century our main titles are most often catchphrases, memorable for their concision, metaphorical in effect, and marketable from catalogues and outthrust spines in bookstores. Covert Operations is a clever title, since it not only connotes "intentionally concealed activities" but contains a pun, which the reader only comes to appreciate late in the book, for married women in English law were designated as femmes coverts. The book could have been entitled Under Cover Operations, since its chief subject is the secrecy engendered by the sexual behavior and mores of the Middle Ages, but we would have lost the pun and the more subversive connotation of "covert." The key word in the main title is, in fact, "operations", since Lochrie takes great pains to direct our attention away from the secrets themselves to how, why, and where they were kept, to their function. As she says (p.4): "one of the tricks of secrecy is to call our attention to the supposed secrets as the locus of truth, rather than to the operations that make them appear to be truths and the social relationships that are negotiated through them."
So far, so good, but I would have preferred a subtitle that delimited its subject, rather than opened it up, for the real subject of the book is not the wider uses of secrecy in the Middle Ages, but the importance, reflection, and resonance of the theme of secrecy in later medieval literature. Each chapter in the book follows a similar pattern: first an investigation into the theories, significance, and context of the topic at hand and then a detailed analysis and interpretation of its place in a work or several works of later medieval literature. Thus Chapter 1, "Tongues Untied: Confession and its Secrets" ends with a discussion of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Chapter 2, "Tongues Wagging: Gossip, Women, and Indiscreet Secrets" begins with Chaucer's Wife of Bath and concludes with the House of Fame; Chapter 3, "Men's Ways of Knowing: the Secret of Secrets and the Secrets of Women treats those two pseudo- scientific works; Chapter 4, "Covert Women and their Mysteries" finishes with the Miller's Tale; and Chapter 5, "Sodomy and Other Female Perversions" analyzes John Gower's Confessio Amantis.
The author is quick to confess her own subjectivity: "I have never assumed, however, that the secrets and secrecy I am studying in medieval culture are solely medieval creations or habitudes; they are as much about me as they are about the Middle Ages." (p.3) One of the purposes of the book, as the author several times states, is to study the Middle Ages in order to understand the present, particularly its seeming sexual polarities and the often blurred lands between. "I would like," the author tells us, "to think that I am tapping the creative potential of the Middle Ages to help us rethink our present..." (p.5). On occasion the book comes close to social activism: "To see contemporary closetedness, for example, in terms of medieval laws governing wives can be useful for enlarging our vision of oppression and developing strategies of resistance to it." (p.11)
Sex, for Lochrie, is the matter that lies at the core of medieval (and, perhaps, all) secrecy and following Foucault, but with thoughtful and insightful correction, she begins in Chapter 1 to examine the construction or institutionalization of sexual secrecy in medieval confession. As she says, "the seal of the confession fostered an obsession with secrecy and its violations, increased sacerdotal power, extended the reach of the Church's power in theory if not always in practice, and designed a discourse that came to define Christian subjectivity." (p.31) Here she discusses the confessional act with its striking complementarities and apparent contradictions, for the confessant was supposed to reveal all, but the confessor was bound to contain and conceal all. In this way the secret was moved from a precarious place to a safe one, where it could be cloaked in the priest's vow of confessional silence and God's all-encompassing bosom. Lochrie is particularly good at examining the often strained relationship between female confessants and male confessors. It would have been helpful at this point to have had a discussion of what the Bible and the medieval interpretation of it contributed to the Middle Ages' theology of secrecy. Three of the Gospels, after all, contain Christ's warning that "Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, no secret that will not be known," (Matt.10:26) which derived from the Parable of the Lamp (Mk 4:22, Lk 8:17).
But if the institutionalized act of confession worked to constrain or at least routinize the revelation of secrets, gossip allowed medieval women to participate in a different kind of discourse, one freer and of their own making. "It is no coincidence that the economy of gossip resembles gender economics as well. Women, who are themselves marked and desired in terms of their exchangeability and use value, are the chief purveyors of gossip, whose value is likewise defined by its exchange but whose danger of unlimited use is always present." (p.65) Lochrie calls gossip "confession's evil twin," (p.92) at least as it was viewed by the church and the male denunciators of wagging tongues. But gossip, like secrecy in general, didn't just belong to women; monasteries, guilds, and farm fields were filled with whispered dirt, with talking behind the backs of others as C.J. Wickham defined gossip in his illuminating lecture, Gossip and Resistance among the Medieval Peasantry, (Inaugural lecture delivered on 30th November 1994 in the University of Birmingham; University of Birmingham, 1995).
In the third chapter, Lochrie examines the appropriation of "the secrets of women--women and their sexuality--[which] are translated into secrets to be exchanged by men. This structure is defining in the sense that secrecy determines what women and their sexuality come to mean in the Middle Ages." (p.98) Thus, the effort of the patriarchy and its intellectual wing firmly entrenched in the schools was to make of women a great and mysterious secret that only learned men could contain and decode. The fact that a great deal of nonsense about women was consequently purveyed in medieval textbooks or even that it warped and hindered real understanding of such subjects as female anatomy didn't stop the work of the schools. But an argument could be made that humoral theory and its attendant errors didn't much matter in the real world. How damaging was 'high learning' at critical moments such as parturition if it took place in the presence of an experienced midwife who had participated in dozens of births? Moreover, not just women, but the lower classes, Jews, and others were generally excluded from the schools and their learned secrets. And even if the arcana or mysterious secrets pursued by the philosophers and theologians were beyond the reach of all but an 'in' crowd, it would be wrong for us to sexualize their entire enterprise and to miss glimpsing the powerful bonding agency that the pursuit of hidden knowledge represented for them (or, for that matter, for us at the modern university). One is also inclined to wonder what to make of the fact that Philosophia, Boethius's companion, and Natura, whom the philosophers poked and probed, were represented and thought of as female presences in the Middle Ages. But there is no disguising the fact that the pursuit of hidden knowledge proved to be a powerful stimulant for medieval intellectuals working in groups, frequently in fierce competition with other groups. Gilbert of Poitiers wrote a letter to Bernard of Chartres in which he spoke of the profound excitement he had experienced in Bernard's classroom as they investigated the secrets of philosophy together. Was the intellectual exhilaration of pursuing secret knowledge in groups the cause of repression or auxiliary and reflective of it? And didn't gossip, as presented by Lochrie, perform a similar bonding function for medieval women? Moreover, literate groups, both male and female, found ways of hiding secrets in writing that are not explored in Covert Operations: see, for instance, Bernhard Bischoff, "Wer ist die Nonne von Hildenheim?," Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschuchte des Benediktiner- Ordens und seiner Zweige, NF 18, 1931, pp.387-388.
Chapter 4 takes up the matter of married women, their "coverture" or exclusion from the public realm, and their loss of employment. My chief worry here was that we chiefly meet city women, especially as the guilds began to banish them, but too seldom explore the uses of secrecy in the agricultural communities that continued to dominate the Middle Ages. On Charlemagne's estates, for instance, people were in the habit of hiding grain from stewards by burying it. Tax evasion of this sort became a secretive 'cottage industry' in the Middle Ages, one that necessarily involved whole families and villages in deception. In concentrating on sexual or gendered secrecy, Lochrie has at some level overlooked the wider economic uses of secrecy, for both men and women had the occasional need to cover up crooked business deals, sharp practices such as the use of false measures, theft, and fraudulent land transactions. There are, in short, some uses of secrecy that touch little on matters of gender, but belong to men and women in similar ways as economic beings. Finally chapter 5, which may be the most orignal of the chapters, examines sodomy as a female perversion, the creation of the medieval closet, and the sharp-edged defense of heterosexual norms by officialdom. "By exposing the 'referential complexity of sodomy' in the Middle Ages as well as the present, we can also begin to chart the exploitation of this complexity to target sinful or 'criminal' persons or activities. And we begin to discern those perversions that are always seeming to be something or somewhere else." (p.204) The discussion of John Gower's "taxonomy of sins" and his complex approach to the perverse is insightful and Lochrie's revision of the standard approach to the problem is clearly stated: "my purpose has been to correct what I see as a dangerously narrow focus on sexuality in the Middle Ages that either excludes gender from its analysis or worse, posits gender as the conservative constraint that sexuality subverts." To this end she moves sodomy from its traditional place as the perversion or inversion of heterosexual relations and seeks to undermine "the misogynistic rhetoric of sodomitic discourse in the Middle Ages and the heterosexual/homosexual framework of contemporary sexual identities. It is only by looking at the intersections of gender and sexuality in both medieval culture and contemporary queer theory that the lines of oppression, medieval and modern, can be made visible." (p.226)
On its own terms Covert Operations is an insightful, nuanced, and systematic study of an aspect of the social history of secrets, but its readers may need to be reminded that there is a great deal more to secrecy in the Middle Ages than this book can deal with, that not all medieval or modern secrets have their roots in gender and sexual issues, and that vernacular literature may not be a particularly good vantage point from which to study secrecy's operations or, for that matter, the Middle Ages.
Secretiveness is such a constant feature of human nature, as common as risibility, that it is hard to imagine any human beings, except the comatose, not possessing secrets that they actively and purposefully conceal from others. In a world shaped or once shaped by Christian values a particular culture of secrecy emerged, one in which sex may well have been or still be what Robert Frost elliptically called "the secret that sits in the middle and knows," while whirling around it we merely suppose. But we should not forget that secrecy had many functions in medieval society, some sinister, some less so. There were in it elements of play as monks and nuns reveled in the concealments of clever cryptograms and signs, of malice and defamation as reports of bastardy and revenge seeped quietly through medieval villages, and of conspiracy as both kings and usurpatious nobles explored techniques for secreting information, often without success. The Merovingian Queen mother Brunhild, for instance, sent a secret letter to one of her supporters at court counseling the assassination of the mayor of the palace. The appointed assassin chose to tear up rather than burn the incriminating letter and, when it was pieced back together again, the plot was revealed and Brunhild cruelly murdered. The acquisition of power (that condition or set of cicumstances by which one individual or group of individuals gains some real or putative advantage over others) probably lies closest to the central appeal of secrecy, and sex (as something subject to concealment, investigation, and revelation) has always had an important part to play in the dynamic search for advantage over others as William Jefferson Clinton recently relearned.
At one point Lochrie cites a modern Ghanaian tribal elder who claimed that his power derived from the fact that he knew things others didn't and ought to. She then says, "since I know little about Ghanaian culture, I cannot presume to represent the practice of secrecy in that culture..." (p.97). And here's the rub. Covert Operations does not constitute a primary investigation of medieval secrecy or the culture that produced it. For the contextual, historical, and theoretical parts of each chapter the author relies on the work of others: Judith Bennett on women in guilds and trades, Maryanne Kowaleski on women's work in medieval England, Joan Cadden on sex differences as laid out in medieval scientific writings, and so on. Only in her treatment of literary texts, chiefly in Middle English, can the work be called primary. But is vernacular literature, those oft visited texts of the medieval canon, the best place to study phenomena that are as socially complex as gossip, confession, censure, and castigation? The history of secrecy in the Middle Ages can't be confined to one corner of the medieval world, to one period within it, or to one species of writing, and that one fiction. For all its charms, vernacular literature, even in the fullness of a Chaucer, was marginal to medieval society and can reflect at most a flat exterior terrain; its purposes were other. Lochrie can and does help us to examine works such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in new and valuable ways, but that is some distance away from helping us to understand the secretive world out of which such works were produced and which at best darkly reveal it.
But this is a problem that besets the academy as a whole today, since too often now the drive to understand works of literature has displaced the Middle Ages proper and threatens to become the Middle Ages, at least as received by students and the uncareful. This unexamined enterprise is, I believe, an almost accidental byproduct of the institutional place of medieval studies in modern universities with their many modern language programs, but small place for medieval history, philosophy, and economy, and almost no place for canon and civil law, liturgy, and theology. The question that looms over us is 'are we meeting the Middle Ages on its terms or ours?' My worry may sound like Plato's complaint against the poets in the Republic, but does not the continued fascination with Chaucer and company run the risk of monopolizing and so deforming our study of the Middle Ages? Too frequently now, particularly at conferences, one has the impression that the real point of medieval studies has become the study of Chaucer and other literary luminaries as though vernacular literature were a relatively self-contained universe of information; what exists inside its circle is alive and worth pursuing, while things outside should receive scant attention, since they don't help us to understand Chaucer et al. And the danger is that overtop Chaucer we can lay the modern world. Even historians would grant (pace Arthur Eddington) that the measurer does not stand outside the measurement s/he makes, but one is still left wondering at what point in the literary approach to the Middle Ages the past ceases to exist on its own terms and the Middle Ages becomes Us and our shifting subjectivities. Perhaps this is just an historian's complaint, but this debate has been too long delayed.
So by all means read Covert Operations; for me it was an education. But don't stop there and, perhaps, don't even start there in your wider consideration of the contours, crevices, and manifold inventions of medieval secrecy.