Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Sometime in the final decades of the fourteenth century, seeking to explain why he is willing to "write of suche highe matiers" and, despite all its difficulties, to set out "in any maner vulgare the termes of divinite," the author of the Chastising of God's Children cites the precedent of "the prophet Balaam." As recorded in the book of Numbers, God grows angry with Balaam when he rides forth, against God's will, in the company of Moabites. God sends an angel, bearing a sword, to block Balaam's way—but it is the prophet's donkey, not the prophet himself, which sees the angel and turns off the road in fear. Balaam beats the ass, but she is stubborn, and she continues to turn away each time the angel appears in their path. Finally, God grants the ass the ability to speak to her rider, asking him: "Whether Y am not thi beeste, on which thou were wont to sitte euere til in-to this present day? Seie thou, what liik thing Y dide euere to thee?" Balaam is then allowed to see the angel, who scolds him again for the beatings. For, "if the femal asse hadde not bowid awey from the weie," the angel says, then "Y hadde slayn thee, and sche schulde lyue" (Num 22:30, 33, here quoting the later version Wycliffite translation, from The Holy Bible, ed. Forshall and Madden 1850, i, 427). If the Lord can give a donkey the power of speech, and enable her to scold her master, then, just maybe, the author of the Chastising can be so bold as to write his "gostly science" in Middle English.In the first installment of his three-volume monograph, Balaam's Ass: Vernacular Theology before the English Reformation, Nicholas Watson sets out on the massive, and massively ambitious, project of writing the history of vernacular religious literature in medieval England. For Watson, the vernacular plays a crucial role in the history of Christian literature in this period, and not least precisely because of the logic evinced in stories like that of Balaam and his donkey. The ass speaks, the hungry are filled with good things, and the rich are sent away empty. "The conviction that the order of things must undergo sudden overthrow . . . lends this writing i.e., literature in the Christian tradition a distinctive dynamism and an unnerved sense of its own instability" (p. 6). And, in light of the role of Latin learning and Latin letters in the medieval English Church, "the need for transformation onto which the story of Balaam and his ass opens out . . . was a powerful driver of vernacular textual production" (pp. 13–14). For more than five centuries before the Reformation of the 1530s, Watson argues, English religious literature in the vernacular is best understood as a continuous tradition, characterized by "adaptation, recombination, and transition, rather than by the transformations and catastrophes that are often taken to punctuate the era" (p. 16). This tradition was central to the larger institution of the English Church, "in a relationship not of dependence on but interdependence with Latin" (pp. 20–21), even as it made a distinctive contribution to medieval English Christianity—a contribution supported not just by the independence of vernacular literary forms from those of Latin, or by the distinctive social relationships lying behind vernacular texts, but also by "the conceptual and imaginative opportunities offered by vernacular languages whose subordination to the language of learning, Latin, had latent theological resonances" (p. 21). Each of these three claims is compelling, and Watson's project will without doubt promote fuller and deeper study of this vast archive of texts.As Watson recognizes, the state of the texts themselves—familiar and unfamiliar, edited and unedited, available in editions of varying quality and, in some cases, now quite old—has supported modes of scholarship that tend to isolate individual clusters of texts and focus on their distinctive features. At the same time, past scholarship has tended to dwell above all on specific periods in which "vernacular literatures may be imagined as becoming culturally freestanding: sufficiently independent from Latin to be worthy of focused attention," rather than read within the "capacious framework of the pedagogical and pastoral mission of the Latin Church" (pp. 19–20). To overcome these shortcomings, and to enable the kind of scholarship for which Watson is such an effective exponent, Balaam's Ass undertakes two major tasks. First, Watson defines a massive archive of what (following Ian Doyle and Vincent Gillespie) he calls "vernacular theology" (cf. pp. 122–36), a collection of texts that would fill "eighty to ninety volumes" of an imagined vernacular Patrologia of religious works in Old English, the French of England, and Middle English (cf. pp. 171–81), and, second, he offers an account of that archive, a truly magisterial literary history, tracing the development of vernacular religious texts within the changing institution of the English Church. This latter task is a Herculean undertaking, and it will be the focus of Volume 2 in its entirety, discussing texts in the French of England between 1100 and 1400, and in Middle English from 1250 to 1540. In contrast, the literary history itself occupies only the final 170 pages of Volume 1, focusing especially on the use of Old English in "the Benedictine vernacular canon" of the tenth and eleventh centuries (chapters 12 and 13), through the early Middle English of Ancrene Wisse and associated works in the early thirteenth century (chapter 20). Watson's account of the early period is brought together in a brilliant chapter on "The Contradictions of Benedictine English" (chapter 15). Here he argues that the idea of the vernacular as a "vulgar tongue . . . defined around its use in the instruction of the unlearned," an idea familiar in recent scholarship, was developed by Ælfric (d. 1005) and his fellow Benedictine reformers as part of an effort "to mark and maintain difference between categories of believer for the spiritual safety of all" (p. 267). This idea was thus articulated, perhaps self-consciously, in opposition to earlier understandings of the vernacular as comparatively flexible and open, and perhaps, Watson suggests, under the influence of earlier efforts to reform the use of Carolingian Latin (cf. pp. 274–81). In contrast to the neat conceptual summation offered in this chapter, the later part of this volume's history, focusing on the increasing role of the secular clergy following the reforms associated with Gregory VII, seems to be laying the foundation for what is to come in Volume 2, even as Watson affirms that, in real and significant ways, Ancrene Wisse "participated . . . in a tradition that extended back to the earliest known works of English prose in the ninth and tenth centuries" (p. 360).While the second half of this volume thus initiates Watson's project of literary history, the first half is focused on the definition of this field of texts, on larger conceptual issues at stake in its study (e.g., the "diglossic contract" described in chapter 1), and on the field's historiography. Here, in addition to some relatively familiar episodes in the history of medieval English religious literature, such as the lingering influence of the Protestant historiography offered in Foxe's Actes and Monuments or the issues of Romantic nationalism informing the philological mission of the Early English Text Society, Watson argues that several figures and cultural movements which may be less familiar to literary critics are nevertheless crucial to our received understandings of, and approaches to, medieval literature: see, for example, his account of twentieth-century Neo-Thomism and the nouvelle théologie (pp. 91–95), or of the work of Catholic apologists including Charles Butler (d. 1832) and Francis Aidan Gasquet (d. 1914) (pp. 81–87). Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the task Watson has set himself in these volumes, R. W. Chambers emerges as something of a hero of English religious literary history in these early chapters, the author of "the period's most ambitious attempt to make the religious vernacular central to national literary history," at once "recasting" and "working vigorously to challenge" the Foxean account of medieval English religious literature, and (bringing together the Anglican and Catholic apologist strains in earlier historiography) notable as an Anglican whose work was crucial to the canonization of St. Thomas More in 1935, for which Chambers was recognized by Pius XI (pp. 69–70).Together with the different medieval ideas of the vernacular charted in chapters 6–10, the history of the field presented in these early chapters will surely (and deservedly) make this volume a staple of graduate-level teaching for many years to come, the kind of book everyone must read to become an English medievalist. 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 also 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.
Andrew Kraebel (Mon,) studied this question.