God complicates things. This is the premise underlying Benjamin Saltzman's arguments in Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England. Secrecy, at is foundations, was a theological concept. Gregory the Great and Bede believed that secrecy was tied to the postlapsarian condition; it arose from a desire to conceal sin, even though (as Adam soon realized in Eden) to keep sin from an omnipotent God was impossible.

Secrets in early medieval England were always at risk of being revealed. Saltzman describes a world in which this theological and soteriological dimension to secret-keeping created societal pressures. Pressure, because an omniscient God could choose to reveal or extract those secrets if he wished, and pressure because humans should in any case wish to be open to God and confess their sins to him. Caught in the middle were legal and monastic institutions. Concealment created difficulties for rulers in prosecuting crimes that no one had witnessed. It created difficulties for religious leaders in determining how and when sin should be detected and corrected.

Saltzman considers English society between ca. 600 and ca. 1100, examining the surviving evidence for concern over secrecy and concealment. The book is organized into three sections: secrecy as handled in law and law codes, in spiritual life, and finally in literature. In searching for secrecy, Saltzman also dismantles anachronistic models for understanding early medieval society. For example, secrecy is a recognizably medieval concept, while privacy is not; Michel Foucault's arguments about the historical development of discipline fail to account for the importance of divine omniscience in the early Middle Ages. He urges the reader to take secrecy as broadly as possible by going back to the texts and considering its associations—first with solitariness but also with ideas of being bound, held captive, fettered, or enslaved. From a methodological perspective, this argument for historicizing is something that few will be able to dispute.

Saltzman's approach offers some illuminating and arresting moments. He 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. These rooms and buildings represented a more mundane way of achieving the same kind of solitude and openness before God as Cuthbert in the Farne Islands. There are other moments of vivid detail: Saltzman examines Aldhelm of Malmesbury's Aenigma 65, about a cat who guards his owner's home in the night, and considers how an account of feline furtiveness might be utilized to reveal how the act of theft was conceptualized.

Saltzman recognizes that his definition of secrecy is wide. There will be some who consider it too wide, and who find too much of a disparity between the ideas of secrecy promoted across the three sections of the book. His response to this criticism is that it must be so in order to decouple the historical term from our modern (highly secularized) associations. What should “secrecy” encompass? This would not be the first time early medieval England has seen a debate between maximalists and minimalists. Take the first section, dealing with the problems of secrecy in law. Saltzman positions this as a demonstration of how society-wide worries over secrecy impinged on the criteria for legal witnesses. Some legal historians will doubtless prefer to conceive of this as a specifically legal problem of criteria for witnesses, which brought up some related but ultimately minor questions of secrecy. Legal historians may also consider an early medieval desire to maintain the coherence of the community as more important than what Saltzman terms “political epistemology” (19). Community is a word that Saltzman uses frequently in respect to the monastic world but not at all in reference to law.

Saltzman's approach invites two questions. First, why England? The idea that an omniscient God knew all secrets and could choose when to reveal them was shared across many medieval polities. While the Old English and Latin riddling culture described in the third section of the book is distinctive, medieval English law codes had mainland European analogues, and English monasticism was but one branch of a greater institutional church. There are a few brief mentions of the Lex Salica, which might hint at law codes grappling with a common problem. Likewise, if early medieval England drew much of its complex thought on monastic secrecy from Cassian and Gregory the Great, did not its neighbors do the same?

Second is the problem of change over time. Saltzman is making a case for broad continuity in notions of secrecy and continuity in its destabilizing effects. But legal and monastic structures were, over the course of five hundred years, transformed. How those structural transformations did (or did not) impinge on ideas of secrecy is worth pinpointing. Some generalizations start to creep in. This may be the inevitable price of such a broad approach.

In the final section, on riddles, Saltzman moves away from secrecy and toward hermeneutics. While it is the section least concerned with secrets per se, it is perhaps the strongest part of the book, engaging in a series of close literary readings. Saltzman imagines what it meant to encounter and try to decipher riddles on the page. Aldhelm, for example, pressed the reader to recognize that the mystery and complexity of creation could not be captured in language, no matter how much puffed-up scholars might attempt to do so. Saltzman also demonstrates impressively how much context is required to understand the intellectual operations undertaken by both Aldhelm and the scribes who copied and annotated his work.

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. It may be a more revealing lens for some discussions that others. But I cannot conceal my admiration for the ambition.