Balaam's Ass: Vernacular Theology Before the English Reformation

Volume 1: Frameworks, Arguments, English to 1250

Nicholas Watson, Ruth Mazo Karras

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780812253726, 9780812253726
• eBook ISBN: 9780812298345
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

PART I Before and After the English Reformation

Church History, National History, Scholarly History

Chapter 1 The Diglossic Contract

1. Before the Vernacular: Cædmon, Bede, Alfred

Maps of the history of western Christian Europe still score thick boundary lines between the medieval era, in which religious thought is supposed to have been the preserve of learned elites, and the eras that flanked it, in which (at least in Protestant historiography) use of the common tongue in teaching and worship is supposed to have made religious truth accessible to all. While it has been challenged with increasing confidence in recent decades, the stolid conviction that the vernacular was peripheral to medieval Catholic Christianity was crucial to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century formation of the tangled cultural heuristic that is the “medieval” itself.

Yet although these boundary lines by now have histories long enough to have influenced the actual course of history, we shall see they are merely traces of an elderly, not to say grumpy, hodgepodge of simplifications and misrepresentations—the troubled scion of religious and nationalist prejudice—that still incites us to approach the medieval centuries with different expectations from those brought to bear on what came earlier or later. After all, the concept of the vernacular is itself medieval in origin, taking self-conscious shape, almost for the first time, in the learned multilingual environment of eighth- and ninth-century Britain, many hundreds of years before the term itself acquired its specifically linguistic meaning (see Appendix, Table 2).

The linguistic situation in which Latin Christianity found itself from the late sixth century on, as it moved into Germanic-speaking parts of Europe in which its tres linguae sacrae (Hebrew, Greek, and Latin) were largely unknown, was challenging.¹ It was suddenly necessary to create a Latinate class capable of learning and teaching the mysteries of theology and worship in communities, some of which may not previously have been exposed in depth either to Christian monotheism, with its universalizing claims, or to writing. It was thus also necessary to develop the translation protocols required to transmit Christian truths to the non-Latinate; that is, to almost everyone, from the apex of society on down.

Near the end of the fifth century, the Frankish king Clovodech or Clovis (466–511) sealed his hold over Gaul by converting, not to Arianism, as the Goths and others had done, but to the Catholic faith, and began the process of rebuilding the former province’s badly damaged network of bishoprics and parishes and its prestigious ties with Rome.² Clovis’s Merovingian successors adopted Latin for official purposes and slowly shifted to local versions of spoken “Vulgar Latin,” as these developed into the cluster of descendants of Latin now known as Old Gallo-Romance.³

The Germanic infiltration of the frontier province of Britannia during the same century was of a different kind, involving little absorption of Celtic languages, spoken Latin, or (at least, initially) Christianity.⁴ Christianization began soon, working outward from British communities living in the new Germanic kingdoms or moving eastward from the territories that would come to be called Wales and from recently converted Ireland, or north from Merovingian Francia. By the time of Augustine of Canterbury’s mission to Kent in 597, apparently precipitated by Bertha (Alderberge), Frankish queen of Kent, it was evidently a good deal further advanced than the somewhat prejudiced textual record is prepared to admit.⁵ From the perspective of the patrician Gregory the Great and his advisers in Rome—still unsure quite how to go about the conversion of entire peoples, and only distantly familiar with the islands of Britain—the conversion of England must nonetheless have seemed in every way a dauntingly difficult prospect.⁶

Yet whatever language problems lay behind the questions of law and custom discussed in the eager letters Gregory and his missionaries passed between Rome and Canterbury over the next few years, as the newly baptized Æthelberht of Kent was promulgating his Law Code, no such problems are allowed to interrupt the account of a nation’s conversion in that triumph of early insular Latinity, Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (ecclesiastical history of the English people), written not much more than a century later (ca. 731).⁷

Throughout the Historia ecclesiastica, Bede is acutely aware of language matters. His book begins by describing Britain as an island in which, “just as the divine law is written in five books ” (the Pentateuch), “one and the same kind of wisdom, namely the knowledge of sublime truth and of true sublimity” is “studied and set forth” in five “languages, the English, British, Irish, Pictish, as well as the Latin” (“iuxta numerum librorum, quibus lex divina scripta est, quinque gentium linguis, unam eandemque summae veritatis et verae sublimitatis scientiam scrutatur, et confitetur, Anglorum videlicet, Brettonum, Scottorum, Pictorum et Latinorum”). Only Latin, through shared “study of the scriptures,” is “in general use among them all” (“quae meditatione scripturarum ceteris omnibus est facta communis”).⁸

In one of the work’s central episodes, he also duly notes the multilingualism of the “Synod of Whitby” in 664, which (under heavy political pressure) resolved the differences between Celtic and Roman Christianity in favor of the Roman, and where the presence of royalty (and perhaps some members of the secular clergy) required use of Northumbrian English. He registers gaps in comprehension between Irish and English, as when King Oswald of Northumbria is pictured translating Áedán of Lindisfarne’s sermon to his thegns and ealdormen, since Áedán’s English was dubious (“Anglorum linguam perfecte non noverat”), “always a most beautiful sight” (“pulcherrimo saepe spectaculo”). He is joyful over the election of the first bishop fluent in Greek as well as Latin and Saxonica lingua, Tobias of Rochester (d. 726).⁹

But in pursuit of his great theme, God’s election of the English, he never shows Latin and English as wholly opaque to each other.¹⁰ The Gregorian mission is anticipated by a bout of interlingual punning, as the saint notices two fair “Angli” slave boys from the English kingdom of Deira in the Roman market and resolves to convert their people into “angeli” rescued “de ira” (from wrath). Briefly derailed by panic, as Augustine and his companions reflect on their fate among a “barbarous, fierce, and unbelieving nation, whose language they would surely not understand” (“Quam barbaram, feram, incredulamque gentem, cuius ne linguam quidem nossent”), the mission sees all its difficulties melt away, as “the language of Britain, which once only knew how to gnash its barbarous teeth,” learns “to sing the praises of God with a Hebrew Alleluia” (“lingua Brittaniae, quae nil aliud noverat quam barbarum frendere, iam dudum in divinis laudibus Hebreum coepit alleluia resonare”). Bede is here quoting a proud passage from Gregory’s Moralia in Job.¹¹

In the work’s central scene of translation, set at Whitby during the tenure of Abbess Hild (d. 680), in the monastery that may previously have hosted the synod, the two languages are then at last explicitly opened up to one another through the inspiration of heaven itself.

After retreating from the hall, as he always did to avoid participating in the communal music making, the herdsman Cædmon finds himself instructed by a being speaking to him in a dream. Told to “sing the origin of created things” (“Canta … principium creaturarum”), he finds his mouth unlocked to proclaim, in inspired English verse, the mysteries of Christian revelation:

Nu scylun hergan hefæn-ricaes uard,

metudæs mæcti end his mod-gidanc

uerc uuldur-fadur, sue he uundra gihuaes,

eci dryctin, or astelidæ.

He aerist scop aelda barnum

heben til hrofe, haleg scepen;

tha middun-geard mon-cynnæs uard,

eci dryctin, æfter tiadæ,

firum foldu, frea allmectig (Gen 1:1).

(Now we must praise the guardian of the heavenly kingdom, the might of the creator, and the purpose of his mind, the works of the Father of glory, when he, the eternal Lord, laid the beginnings of every wondrous thing. A holy creator, he first fashioned heaven as a roof for the children of men; then the guardian of humankind, the eternal Lord, almighty ruler, afterward fashioned the habitable world, the earth for men.)¹²

Having received this gift of singing through direct divine aid (“sed divinitus adiutus gratis canendi donum accepit”), and immediately beginning to add verses of his own to those given from heaven, Cædmon reports the situation to his abbess and her clergy. He then continues to make “devout and religious songs” (“carmina religioni et pietati”) of soul-piercing sweetness (“maxima suavitate et conpunctione”), from any portion of the Bible those learned in Latin can translate for him (“quicquid ex divinis litteris per interpretes disceret”).¹³

The story of “Cædmon’s Hymn” used to be seen as effectively a repetition in the poetic domain of Gregory’s celebrated instruction to his evangelists to carry over certain pagan forms into Christian culture. “The temples of the idols among that people ought not to be destroyed at all, but the idols in them,” Gregory urgently wrote to his emissary Mellitus in 601, canceling an earlier instruction to the opposite effect, and perhaps inaugurating a new direction in Christian missionary policy in the process.¹⁴ The song’s opening, “Nu scylun hergan,” which one could render “from now on we must praise,” might indeed suggest the “now” not only of revelation but of transition or displacement, as the poet instals a new Christian subject matter into an aesthetic order whose associations were formerly pagan, beginning with Genesis.

Whether or not such a reading of the scene (set in a monastery long after the conversion) is plausible, however, Bede’s emphasis falls elsewhere: on how Cædmon, now a monk, develops his gift with the assistance of Hild’s Latinate clerics, as they furnish him with the biblical matter of his later songs, said to cover the whole of sacred history, from Creation to Judgment. After ruminating on this material, “like a clean animal chewing the cud” (“quasi mundum animal ruminando”), Cædmon turns his teachers into auditors, as they become the first of many drawn from vice and incited to virtue by his sonorous performances.¹⁵ For Bede, this is a story about a successful collaboration between Latin and English under God and enlightened monastic rule.

In surviving eighth-century sources, this collaboration is often lived, rather than written. However carefully Hild’s clerics listen to Cædmon, the passage nowhere implies that they record his words.¹⁶ Bede emphasizes his respect for English verse by acknowledging that he has been unable to render the verse into Latin “without loss to its beauty and dignity” (“sine detrimento sui decoris ac dignitatis”).¹⁷ But he chose to omit the English poem from his written account, perhaps because he meant the work to circulate internationally or because he assumed the mode of English verse to be oral. In many copies of the Latin Historia ecclesiastica down to the twelfth century, the verse has been added in the margins only later, and with a degree of variance that has been take...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• 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
• Part II. The Medieval Idea of the Vernacular: Models, Terms, Concepts
• Part III. English in the Early Middle Ages: Language Politics and Monastic Reform
• Part IV. From Old English to Early Middle English: Continuity, Adaptation, Secularization
• Coda to Volume 1
• Appendix: Tables of Dates, Texts, and Persons
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Manuscripts
• General Index
• Acknowledgments