Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England by Benjamin A. Saltzman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England by Benjamin A. Saltzman Mahel Hamroun Benjamin A. Saltzman, Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2019) xv + 339 pp., 12 ills. Equal parts conceptual history and literary criticism, Benjamin A. Saltzman's first book, Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England, is an ambitious work. Weaving together a dazzling array of sources and scholarship, Bonds of Secrecy interrogates the ethics of secrecy in a society bound by an omniscient God. The belief that God had ultimate control over the concealment and revelation of secrets both shaped and was shaped by the institutions of the early medieval English world and produced, in turn, a culture of scrutiny that profoundly informed literary practice. Part 1 considers the problem of secrecy in early medieval English legal institutions. Through the analysis of secular law codes and diplomatic sources, the first chapter demonstrates the myriad ways in which early medieval English law was preoccupied with "crimes of concealment" (23). Saltzman argues that this preoccupation reflects efforts by emerging English institutions of power to [End Page 297] maintain legal authority. Secrecy was a threat because it undermined the political epistemology which underpinned that authority—after all, "what is unknown to the sovereign cannot be governed" (19). For this reason, the regulation of both major and minor crimes of concealment would increasingly come to resemble that of treason. Yet crimes of concealment were difficult to regulate. Judicial testimony—a crucial part of early medieval English legal procedure—was "particularly hospitable to deliberate acts of concealment," simultaneously offering the promise of proof and the potential for concealment (20). Cognizant of their own limitations in ensuring the authenticity of such testimonies, early medieval English kings deployed the juridical supervision of God to bolster their authority, harnessing God's omniscience through oaths and ordeals. As the second chapter reveals, such reliance on God primed the law for dealing with situations in which testimony was "not just obscured but inaccessible" (60). Through the close reading of the 53rd law of King Ine's code, which (among other things) considers the vouching of a dead man's grave to warranty, Saltzman presents the grave as a special site for secrecy and potential truth: with the hand of God, "even the silence of death could be transcended" (61). Part 2 of the book moves from the royal court to the monastery, where the "secrets of one's heart" emerge as subjects of particularly stringent scrutiny (70). Secrecy was not, however, always bad. Chapters 3 and 4 draw from monastic rules and hagiography to explore the tensions between desirable and undesirable forms of secrecy within the monastic ideal. Contrary to modern universalist notions of secrecy, Saltzman reveals that discourses of secrecy in early English monastic communities were highly contingent on the specific traditions and actions from which they stemmed. This contingency, coupled with the distinct precision of monastic scrutiny, created spaces for sanctioned—even encouraged—forms of secrecy. The difference hinged on the acknowledgement of God's omniscience. If crimes of concealment represented a theft of knowledge from the crown in secular law, in the monastic context they were effectively theft from God. As Saltzman reminds us, however, stealing knowledge from an omniscient God was an exercise in futility. Illicit secrecy was therefore dangerous, not because it deprived God of knowledge, but because it signaled disbelief in God's omniscience. Such disbelief, Saltzman argues, was tantamount to surrendering oneself to the devil, an egregious crime for one ostensibly bound in servitude to God. Confession, conversely, becomes an act of faith, freeing oneself from the devil's shackles and delivering one's soul into God's possession. The purest expression of this deliverance was, perhaps paradoxically, itself form of secrecy: a "deliberate and conscientious" separation from other human beings in service of an equally deliberate and conscientious openness to God (81). This secrecy, which Saltzman calls "spiritual secrecy," came to be a fundamental feature of early English monastic life (96). Indeed, early English monastic architecture encouraged spatial separation in...