ABSTRACT
In his introductory volume of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault identifies in the medieval institutionalization of confession the infancy of the modern subject. Discrediting the “repressive hypothesis” associated with the psychoanalytic narrative of subjectivity, Foucault insists that subjectivity is bound to “the multiplication of discourses concerning sex in the field of power itself.”1 The modern society is one that dedicates itself to “speaking of it [sex] ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.”2 The medieval institutionalization of confession was thus simultaneously an institutionalization of secrecy, one that not only generated speech but also an esoteric literature of confession in the form of the Catholic pastoral and increasingly articulate guides for self-scrutiny to aid the translation of one’s own secrets into discourse.3 Karma Lochrie’s book on the function of secrecy in medieval literary texts builds upon Foucault’s thesis that, as she puts it, “[s]ecrecy … contains the act of disclosure, and the pressure to reveal is intimately associated with the obligation to conceal;” but she faults Foucault for his reduction of medieval technologies of secrecy to the discursive performance of confessions, a maneuver that allows him to reduce “the complex designations of the medieval term ‘the flesh’ to a single referent, ‘sex.’”4 Lochrie grants Foucault’s acknowledgment that the “sex” confessed was not so much the content of secrecy as the function of secrecy, a “technolog[y] of the self, and the systems of power and knowledge in the Middle Ages.”5
This technology of secrecy is not reducible to the discursive practices surrounding the confession of sex. The secrecy of the flesh also fed a body of literature dedicated to revealing to its readers secrets about the natural world, the female body, and human generation.6
