COVERT OPERATIONS

Covert Operations The Medieval Uses of Secrecy Karma Lochrie Lochrie takes a significant feature of medieval culture, secrecy, and translates the issues it raises to urgent contemporary concerns while still illuminating their meaning within medieval contexts. Her writing is lucid and concise while at the same time suggestive and provocative. She has an unerring eye for detail, and an impressive ability to argue through example. This is an important book.--Larry Scanlon, Rutgers University Engaging and innovative. . . . The present volume offers exemplary close readings of primary works enhanced and enriched by the theoretical framework.--Choice A tantalizing work. . . . Hidden away in this book are treasures well worth the hunt.--English Historical Review Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book In Covert Operations, Karma Lochrie brings the categories and cultural meanings of secrecy in the Middle Ages out into the open. Isolating five broad areas--confession, womens gossip, medieval science and medicine, marriage and the law, and sodomitic discourse--Lochrie examines various types of secrecy and the literary texts in which they are played out. She reads texts as central to Middle English studies as the Parsons Tale, the Millers Tale, the Secretum Secretorum, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as well as a broad range of less familiar works, including a gynecological treatise and a little-known fifteenth-century parody in which gossip and confession become one. As she does so she reveals a great deal about the medieval past--and perhaps just as much about the early development of the concealments that shape the present day. Karma Lochrie is Ruth Halls Professor of English at Indiana University. She is the author of