Balaam's Ass: Vernacular Theology Before the English Reformation

"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

"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

"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

"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." ~Christopher Cannon, Johns Hopkins University

"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