Frameworks, Arguments, English to 1250 is the first volume of Nicholas Watson's long awaited three-volume study, Balaam's Ass: Vernacular Theology Before the English Reformation. This first volume was well worth the wait. While a definitive evaluation of this project will depend on its completion, there is plenty in this first volume to suggest that Balaam's Ass will fundamentally alter the field. “Primarily a work of literary history,” as Watson explains (xvi), the book is also interdisciplinary, intellectual history almost as much as literary scholarship. As intellectual history, Balaam's Ass is already the most groundbreaking work treating later medieval England since Anne Hudson's Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Writing and Lollard History (1988). As literary history, Balaam's Ass is destined to take its place among the small group of works foundational to the current field of Middle English Studies—works such as C.S. Lewis's Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1938); D.W. Robertson's Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (1962); Carolyn Dinshaw's Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (1989); Lee Patterson's Chaucer and the Subject of History (1991); and David Wallace's Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (1997).

That four of these five works center on Chaucer is not mere coincidence. Robertson's Preface was largely a critique of what he took to be Lewis's overly secularist, overly modernist account of the medieval poetry of courtly love. He argued that Chaucer must be recognized primarily as a medieval Christian, that his poetry, like all medieval poetry, should be read according to the hermeneutical principles ancient and medieval Christianity developed for interpreting Scripture, and that most of the techniques of modern literary scholarship were irremediably anachronistic when applied to medieval literature. Dinshaw, Patterson, and Wallace, along with a host of other scholars, responded to Robertson's strictures with a much more dialectic sense of history informed by the explosion of new approaches in the field of literary studies as a whole—most notably feminism and the new historicism. The more capacious view of Chaucer that emerged as a result mirrored a huge and largely unprecedented project of canon expansion that was occurring at the same time across all of Middle English studies—a development that the field also shared with the whole of literary studies. Scholars began a wholesale reexamination of Chaucer's contemporaries and successors, both those already comparatively well discussed, such as William Langland and the Gawain-poet, and those recognized but largely ignored, such as John Gower, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate, and those almost entirely ignored, such as Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. We can see Balaam's Ass as almost an apotheosis of this trend. Watson defines vernacular theology as “the sum of the religious ideas circulating in the local languages of the polities that made up medieval Christian society and the genres through which they found expression” (135). Under this category he collects not only the entirely of the medieval literary canon as it is commonly understood, but also includes the very large body of vernacular devotional writings that generally get very scant notice. He thus reveals the problem with the Robertsonian approach taken was less in its insistence on medieval religiosity per se than its overly narrow definition—that is, restricted to writings in Latin.

As Watson demonstrates, this narrow view has very long historical roots. It originates in the Reformation itself, in its polemical understanding of its promotion of vernacular biblical translation as a leading symbol of its break with medieval Catholicism. It persists in both negative and positive versions. In the negative version, the putative sclerosis and corruption of the late medieval Church can be summed up in its attachment to Latin, whose deadness the vitality of the vernacular sweeps aside in the emergence of national literary tradition and as the new medium for religious expression. In the positive version, the unchanging stability of Latin undergirds an era of near utopic consensus: an age of “quiet hierarchies,” in Robertson's famous phrase, (Preface, 51) with everyone knowing, accepting, and keeping to their place in society. To support this view, Robertson, like many other medievalists, could turn to the Patrologia Latina of Jacques Paul Migne, a monumental nineteenth-century collection of 221 volumes, extending from the ancient Latin fathers to Innocent III's death in 1216. Watson calls this collection an archive, and sketches a “sequel” to Migne, a supplementary archive of eighty to ninety books representing “medieval English vernacular theology” (172). The Patrologia is an archive, but one could also call it a canon, especially in regard to its habitual use by literary scholars. The same thing could be said of Watson's proposed sequel, and here we arrive at the heart of the profoundly transformative potential of Balaam's Ass. Watson has easily doubled—if not tripled—the size and scope of Middle English scholarship's object of study. Nor does the project's potential end there.

Watson traces vernacular devotional writing from the moment of Benedictine Reform in the tenth century to that of the Ancrene Wisse group in the middle of the thirteenth. Defining the relation between the vernacular and Latin as “diglossic” (29–45), he seeks to demonstrate “that the history of the English vernacular is best understood as continuous: characterized, that is, by adaptation, recombination, and transition, rather than by the transformations and catastrophes that are often taken to punctuate the era” (16). Thus, the pastoral functions generally associated with the increase in English manuscript production in the fourteenth century were already fully in evidence in the tenth and eleventh in the work of such reformers as Aethelwold, Aelfric, and Wulfstan of York. Nor did English immediately yield these functions in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest in 1066. While post-Conquest survivals of Old English have traditionally been treated as antiquarian, Watson argues they are better understood as a continuation of long-established monastic traditions that only gradually gave way to an emergent Middle English and the needs of a newly assertive secular (i.e., non-monastic) clergy. Focusing sustained attention on the period between 950 and 1250, Balaam's Ass draws Middle English and Old English studies much closer together than they have been in decades, and provides compelling readings of a wide variety of works that many scholars know mainly as titles, if at all, including Alfred's Hierdeboc (a translation of Gregory's Pastoral Care), Aelfric's Catholic Homilies, The Proverbs of Alfred, Layamon's Brut, Sanctus Beda, Orm's Orrmulum, and Vices and Virtues. The book closes with a magisterial discussion of the much better documented Ancrene Wisse group.

This account's most striking feature is its proposal of three models of “institutional stance and social address” (151–70): a “pastoral” model in which the vernacular functions as the vehicle for clerical instruction of the laity; a “communal” model, in which “writer and reader” are both “equals under God: fellow Christians, bound by a duty of mutual encouragement” (157); and a “patronal” model in which a clerical writer responds to the needs of a lay patron. The first and third categories will not elicit much surprise. However, with the second, Watson suggests that vernacular theology constitutes not only a separate or extended archive or canon, but also a distinct textual culture, not reducible to the social structures of clerical or lay authority. His succeeding volumes should make clear the precise contours of that culture.