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Whether shared politically as diplomacy, religiously as confession, intellectually as knowledge, or socially as gossip, secrets structured power relations in medieval society, just as they do today. (1) People who hold them can use them to gain an advantage over others and once shared secrets can define membership in a group. Shared secrets can also become gossip, which, as Patricia Meyer Spacks postulates, incorporates possibility that people utterly lacking in public power may affect views of figures who make things happen in public sphere. (2) Gossip can spread damaging information, undermining individuals' public personae. It can even affect individuals' views of themselves. Gossip, sharing of secrets, and their combined ability to affect hierarchies of power are frequent concerns in late-medieval Scottish poet William Dunbar's works. For example, Dunbar reveals his awareness of potency of gossip in didactic poem beginning How sowld rewill me or in quhat wys [How should rule me or in what way]. (3) The poem describes a man's frustration with public condemnation of his actions. He complains that however he conducts his life, someone will despise his manners: I can not leif in no degre / Bot sum my maneris will dispyis [I cannot live in any manner, but someone will despise my behavior]. (4) Later stanzas make clear that what distresses him is gossip, or backbiting, an aspect of envy as medieval preachers categorized it. (5) For example, stanza six reads: Gif be sene in court ouirlang, Than will thay mvrmour thame ammang, My freyndis ar not worth a fle, That sa lang but gwerdon gang. Lord God, how sall governe me? (6) [If am seen in too long in court, then will they murmur among themselves that my friends are not worth a fly, since go so long without a reward. Lord God, how shall govern myself?] The poem's impetus derives from narrator's inability to please those that murmur, whom he identifies as baith man and lad and twa and twa. (7) As a whole, poem laments these whisperers' tendency to interpret every action and aspect of his appearance in worst terms. The narrator's desire to please gossips is implicit in repeated final line of each stanza when he asks God to help him discover how he ought to behave (Lord God, how sail governe me?). In this poem, Dunbar describes how gossip impels an individual to behave in contradictory ways--whether happy or sad, liberal or conservative--in order to gain public approval, only to be continually foiled. A concern about danger posed by women's gossip lies at heart of one of Dunbar's most frequently discussed works, The Tretis of Tua Mariit Wemen and Wedo. (8) The poem depicts three women who meet on Midsummer Eve to gossip about their husbands and lovers and to share secrets about best ways to control men. Michael G. Cornelius has described resulting conversation as something that clearly horrify medieval men and indeed men of any era. (9) In associating gossip with women, poem affirms Karma Lochrie's observation that medieval texts persistently depict the dangers of gossip as a corrosive discourse associated almost exclusively with women. (10) Yet, in end poem's frame structure undercuts potentially corrosive effects of women's conversation on patriarchal social hierarchy by identifying narrator as a male eavesdropper who reveals women's conversation to a male audience (the poem ends when narrator asks his listeners or auditoris which they would choose for a wife, if they had to marry one). (11) By inscribing male auditors and sharing women's secret strategies with them, narrator alerts men to their own vulnerabilities, enabling them to thwart women's designs and bolstering patriarchal power. The frame structure converts female secrets into male secrets, corroborating Lochrie's theory that throughout medieval literature secrecy functions rhetorically to define and contain feminine, to frame crucial power relationships and notions of medieval subject, and to foster masculine textual community, authority, and intimacy. …
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