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

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2022 English
• VerfasserIn: Watson, Nicholas,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: The Middle Ages Series
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (640 p.) :; 5 tables

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- General Preface -- Conventions -- General Introduction: The Prophesying Ass: Patterns and Premises -- PART I. BEFORE AND AFTER THE ENGLISH REFORMATION: CHURCH HISTORY, NATIONAL HISTORY, SCHOLARLY HISTORY -- Chapter 1. The Diglossic Contract -- Chapter 2. Anglican Historiography -- Chapter 3. Romantic Philology -- Chapter 4. Catholic Apologetics -- Chapter 5. Medieval Studies and Modernism -- PART II. THE MEDIEVAL IDEA OF THE VERNACULAR: MODELS, TERMS, CONCEPTS -- Chapter 6. Christian Teaching Across the Longue Durée -- Chapter 7. Theology and the Christian Community -- Chapter 8. The Vernacular as a Clerical Construct -- Chapter 9. Institutional Stance and Social Address -- Chapter 10. The Vernacular Archive -- PART III. ENGLISH IN THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES: LANGUAGE POLITICS AND MONASTIC REFORM -- Chapter 11. Old English in the Long Twelfth Century -- Chapter 12. The Benedictine Vernacular Canon I: Tenth Century -- Chapter 13. The Benedictine Vernacular Canon II: Eleventh Century -- Chapter 14. English in Monastery, Minster, and Court -- Chapter 15. The Contradictions of Benedictine English -- PART IV. FROM OLD ENGLISH TO EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH: CONTINUITY, ADAPTATION, SECULARIZATION -- Chapter 16. The Narrowing of Written English -- Chapter 17. The Transformation of Insular History -- Chapter 18. The New Pastoralia I: Secular Priests and Regular Canons -- Chapter 19. The New Pastoralia II: Diocesan Preaching Books -- Chapter 20. The New Pastoralia III: Anchoresses and the City -- Coda to Volume 1 -- Appendix: Tables of Dates, Texts, and Persons -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index of Manuscripts -- General Index -- Acknowledgments