Balaam's Ass: Vernacular Theology Before the English Reformation: Volume 1: Frameworks, Arguments, English to 1250

by Nicholas Watson

Overview

For over seven hundred years, bodies of writing in vernacular languages served an indispensable role in the religious and intellectual culture of medieval Christian England, yet the character and extent of their importance have been insufficiently recognized. A longstanding identification of medieval western European Christianity with the Latin language and a lack of awareness about the sheer variety and quantity of vernacular religious writing from the English Middle Ages have hampered our understanding of the period, exercising a tenacious hold on much scholarship.

Bringing together work across a range of disciplines, including literary study, Christian theology, social history, and the history of institutions, Balaam's Ass attempts the first comprehensive overview of religious writing in early England's three most important vernacular languages, Old English, Insular French, and Middle English, between the ninth and sixteenth centuries. Nicholas Watson argues not only that these texts comprise the oldest continuous tradition of European vernacular writing, but that they are essential to our understanding of how Christianity shaped and informed the lives of individuals, communities, and polities in the Middle Ages.

This first of three volumes lays out the long post-Reformation history of the false claim that the medieval Catholic Church was hostile to the vernacular. It analyzes the complicated idea of the vernacular, a medieval innovation instantiated in a huge body of surviving vernacular religious texts. Finally, it focuses on the first, long generation of these writings, in Old English and early Middle English.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812253726
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date:	06/21/2022
Series:	The Middle Ages Series
Pages:	616
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Nicholas Watson is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature at Harvard University.

Table of Contents

General Preface xiii

Conventions xx

General Introduction: The Prophesying Ass: Patterns and Premises 1

1 Patterns: Reversal, Resistance, Reform

2 Premises: Continuity, Centrality, Distinctiveness

Part I Before and After the English Reformation: Church History, National History, Scholarly History

Chapter 1 The Diglossic Contract 29

1 Before the Vernacular: Cædmon, Bede, Alfred

2 Vernacula Lingua: The Genealogy of a Term

Chapter 2 Anglican Historiography 46

1 The Elizabethans I: Foxe's Actes and Monuments

2 Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries'. James, Smith, Burnet, Froude

Chapter 3 Romantic Philology 59

1 Medievalism and Nationalism

2 The Early English Text Society

2 From Cambridge History of English Literature to Continuity of English Prose

Chapter 4 Catholic Apologetics 72

1 The Elizabethans II: Harpsfield, Sander, Stapleton, Harding

2 From Rheims New Testament to XVI Revelations of Divine Love

3 Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Bossuet, Fénelon, Butler, Gasquet

Chapter 5 Medieval Studies and Modernism 88

1 Three Renaissances and a Revolt

2 Neo-Thomism, Nouvelle Théologie, and the Second Vatican Council

3 English Studies and Medieval Religious Literature Since the 1930s

Part II The Medieval Idea of the Vernacular: Models, Terms, Concepts

Chapter 6 Christian Teaching Across the Longue Durée 105

1 The Evangelical Imperative: Robert of Gretham's Miroir

2 Cultural Change and Historical Explanation

Chapter 7 Theology and the Christian Community 122

1 Versions of "Vernacular Theology"

2 Genres of Vernacular Theology

Chapter 8 The Vernacular as a Clerical Construct 137

1 Artificial/Natural, Metalinguistic/Sociolinguistic

2 Unmarked/Marked, Esoteric/Exoteric

Chapter 9 Institutional Stance and Social Address 151

1 The Pastoral Model: Vulgar Tongue

2 The Communal Model: Common Tongue

3 The Patronal Model: Mother Tongue

Chapter 10 The Vernacular Archive 171

1 Shape, Phases, Rhythm

2 Life Cycles, Mobility, Loss

Part III English in the Early Middle Ages: Language Politics and Monastic Reform

Chapter 11 Old English in the Long Twelfth Century 195

1 Scholarly Translators and Monastic Bishops: "Sanctus Beda was i-boren"

2 A Call to Revival: The Tremulous Hand

3 Scholarly Rationales for Late Old English

4 Homiliaries and Other Genres

Chapter 12 The Benedictine Vernacular Canon I: Tenth Century 212

1 Imagined Benedictine Communities

2 Æthelwold: Glosses, Rules, Monastic Pedagogy (950-75)

Chapter 13 The Benedictine Vernacular Canon II: Eleventh Century 223

1 Ælfric: Homilies and Pastoral Letters (990-1010)

2 Wulfstan: Homilies, Law Codes, Political Theology (1000-1023)

3 Monastic Pastoralia Across the Eleventh Century

Chapter 14 English in Monastery, Minster, and Court 238

1 The Benedictine Dominance of the Textual Record

2 Problems of Evidence: Innovation or Continuity?

3 Blickling Homilies, Vercelli Homilies, Catholic Homilies

4 Court Writing in the Alfredian Tradition

Chapter 15 The Contradictions of Benedictine English 261

1 The Invention of Language Hierarchy

2 Carolingian Language Reform: Alcuin's Attack on Vulgar Latin

3 European Language Politics and Old English Textuality

Part IV From Old English to Early Middle English: Continuity, Adaptation, Secularization

Chapter 16 The Narrowing of Written English 285

1 English in a Changing Sociolinguistic Environment

2 The Old English Apollonius at the Court of Cnut

3 Late Old English as a Sign of the Past

4 The Corpus of Early Middle English Before 1250

Chapter 17 The Transformation of Insular History 301

1 Reformulations of Kingship in The Proverbs of Alfred

2 The Modernity of Layamon's Brut

Chapter 18 The New Pastoralia I: Secular Priests and Regular Canons 315

1 Pedagogical Ambition and Public Address

2 Navigating the World in Vices and Virtues

3 Willful Learning and the Orrmulum

Chapter 19 The New Pastoralia II: Diocesan Preaching Books 332

1 Monastic Pastoral Care in a Reorganized Church

2 The Lambeth Homilies and Worcester Cathedral Priory

3 The Trinity Homilies and St. Paul's, London

Chapter 20 The New Pastoralia III: Anchoresses and the City 346

1 The Setting of Ancrene Wisse

2 The Audiences of the Ancrene Wisse Group

Coda to Volume 1 361

Appendix: Tables of Dates, Texts, and Persons 371

Notes 377

Bibliography 461

Index of Manuscripts 565

General Index 567

Acknowledgments 585

Editorial Reviews

"Watson brilliantly traces what he calls the ‘dynamic opposition’ between theology in the vernacular in Britain and the development of its literatures, showing that neither history can be written without the other. With an immense learning (lightly worn) Watson presents us, for the first time, with the whole archive of vernacular religious writing—at one point imagining it physically as a sequel to Migne’s Patrologia Latina—drawing out the concepts and historical connections that make it such necessary reading. This volume and the two further volumes that will follow it restore our rich religious literature to its rightful place at the center of the history of all literature in English."

Johns Hopkins University Christopher Cannon

"As this important volume shows, the story of English literature cannot be told without the history of its vernacular theology. Scholars of English literature, as well as scholars of Christian history, will benefit from the capaciousness of this volume’s learning and the clarity of its insight as it cuts confidently across disciplinary boundaries of period, place, and language. Watson makes clear that his focus on the vernacular, and specifically on vernacular theology, disrupts a tradition of nation-based literary history, and the nationalist and imperialist ideologies that shaped and have been shaped by that history."

Modern Philology

"Essential...It would be difficult to overstate the magnitude and importance of Watson’s project for surveying and redefining the role of the vernacular in Christianity across medieval England—a vast expanse often, but falsely, seen as an oppressively Latin-only religious world....Sensitively literary and historically capacious, this volume will be required reading for those interested in religious and literary history."

Choice

"Polemical yet irenic, madly ambitious yet carefully delimited, passionately committed to its arguments yet always willing to weigh objections, up-to-the minute, yet rooted in an extremely longue durée, Balaam’s Ass is, in every sense, magisterial."

Northwestern University Barbara Newman

"Balaam’s Ass is an unabashed grand narrative, a field-defining exploration of the role of the vernacular in religious history and simultaneously, the role of religious writing in the history of vernacular literature...[T]he sheer scale and ambition of this book makes it invaluable."

Early Middle English

"For its deep research, its sensitive arguments, and its far-reaching conclusions, the first volume of Balaam's Ass deserves a wide readership. With intellectual generosity and clear prose, Watson lays the groundwork for many new studies and debates, none of which can dismiss the central­ity or distinctiveness of vernacular religious writing in English literary history."

Studies in the Age of Chaucer

"Defining a field of texts, introducing readers to the history of their study, and arguing for a specific and intellectually ambitious model of the ways in which these texts respond to one another across centuries, Watson writes with an inspiringly clear sense that this is a field of study with as much history ahead of it as behind it, that there is more valuable and rewarding work to do—and he provides a model of what generous and sophisticated scholarship in this field can look like. Balaam’s Ass is, very simply, the sort of book that the field needs, and a book that could only be written by someone with Watson’s uncanny ability to hold so much diverse material together in a single capacious vision of cultural history, doing justice at once to the distinctiveness of this literature and the strong sense of its continuity."

Journal of English and Germanic Philology

"Polemical yet irenic, madly ambitious yet carefully delimited, passionately committed to its arguments yet always willing to weigh objections, up-to-the minute, yet rooted in an extremely longue durée, Balaam's Ass is, in every sense, magisterial."—Barbara Newman, Northwestern University

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