Bonds of Secrecy

How beliefs about human and divine secrets informed medieval ideas about the mind and shaped the practices of literary interpretations

What did it mean to keep a secret in early medieval England? It was a period during which the experience of secrecy was intensely bound to the belief that God knew all human secrets, yet the secrets of God remained unknowable to human beings. In Bonds of Secrecy, Benjamin A. Saltzman argues that this double-edged conception of secrecy and divinity profoundly affected the way believers acted and thought as subjects under the law, as the devout within monasteries, and as readers before books. One crucial way it did so was by forming an ethical relationship between the self and the world that was fundamentally different from its modern reflex. Whereas today the bearers of secrets might be judged for the consequences of their reticence or disclosure, Saltzman observes, in the early Middle Ages a person attempting to conceal a secret was judged for believing he or she could conceal it from God. In other words, to attempt to hide from God was to become ensnared in a serious sin, but to hide from the world while deliberately and humbly submitting to God's constant observation was often a hallmark of spiritual virtue.

Looking to law codes and religious architecture, hagiographies and riddles, Bonds of Secrecy shows how legal and monastic institutions harnessed the pervasive and complex belief in God's omniscience to produce an intense culture of scrutiny and a radical ethics of secrecy founded on the individual's belief that nothing could be hidden from God. According to Saltzman, this ethics of secrecy not only informed early medieval notions of mental activity and ideas about the mind but also profoundly shaped the practices of literary interpretation in ways that can inform our own contemporary approaches to reading texts from the past.

"[I]lluminating and arresting...[Saltzman] combines textual and material evidence to examine how the space and shape of early medieval churches facilitated a desire to pray in secret: oratories, porticoes, and small rooms for private prayer must have been significant features in the landscape...Saltzman is surely right to put the looming promise of the inescapable judgment of God at the center of the early medieval polity. He offers us secrecy as a lens to think through early medieval England"

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Equal parts conceptual history and literary criticism, Bonds of Secrecy is an ambitious work. Weaving
together a dazzling array of sources and scholarship, [Saltzman] interrogates the ethics of secrecy in a society bound by an omniscient God... In approaching the phenomenon of secrecy in early medieval England as a tabula rasa, Saltzman forces us to confront our own preconceived notions of secrecy and to reevaluate the ways in which we understand its function and its potential, both then and now...Readers have much to gain from reading this book.

"Saltzman’s book is impressive in its range, compelling in its argument, and significant in its contribution. It will undoubtedly remain a touchstone for scholarship on early medieval notions of agency, interiority, and legal identity for a long time to come."