Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780812221749)

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, women's 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 "Parson's Tale," the "Miller's 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.

Author: Karma Lochrie
ISBN-10: 0812221745
ISBN-13: 9780812221749
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Language: English
Published: 09/21/2011
Pages: 304
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.80d