Covert Operations

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, women's gossip, 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 Parson's Tale, the Miller's Tale, the Secretum Secretorum, John Gower's Confessio Amantis, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as well as a broad range of less familiar works, such as 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.

First sentence: With their lead-lined walls, double doors, heating, cooling and ventilation systems and a special screen to block spit and bad breath, Genuflex confessionals have little in common with the creaky, musty, old-fashioned boxes where churchgoers knelt in darkness to whisper their sins into the ear of the parish priest. . . .

Year

1998

Language

English

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Editions

4

Pages

292

ISBN

9780812234732

Data source: Wikidata