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

By Nicholas Watson

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jun 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9780812298345

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Cover: Balaam’s Ass, Vernacular Theology Before the English Reformation, Volume I: Frameworks, Arguments, English to 1250 by Nicholas Watson

This is the first of three projected volumes of

Balaam’s Ass: Vernacular Theology Before the English Reformation.

The volumes are as follows:

Volume 1: Frameworks, Arguments, English to 1250

Volume 2: French 1100–1400, English 1250–1540

Volume 3: The Mystical Ark: Salvation, Conversion, Community

BALAAM’S ASS

Vernacular Theology Before the English Reformation

Volume I: Frameworks, Arguments, English to 1250

Nicholas Watson

Logo: PENN

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES

Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor

Edward Peters, Founding Editor

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Copyright © 2022 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Hardcover ISBN 9780812253726

Ebook ISBN 9780812298345

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

For Amy

and in loving memory of my father,

Angus Watson, musician

(1932–2019)

Also, my sistir, I drede sore to write of suche highe matiers. For I have neither felinge ne knowinge opinly to declare hem in English ne in Latin, and namely in English tunge. For it passith fer my wit to shewe you in any maner vulgare the termes of divinite.

Also I fele mysilf unworthy to have that gostly science whereby I shuld knowe or have inwarde felinge what doctours wolden mene in her holy writinges.

These causes considred and many othere, skilfully I may drede to write.… But askinge help of almighty God, by whos might the asse had speche to the profete Balaam, aftir youre desire, as ferforth as I dare or knowe, of temptations I wole shewe you in special and in general, and to hem remedies, with sum other matiers that lightly wol falle to purpos; evermore submittinge me lowely to the correction of wise men and clerkis and men of gostly knowinge.

(Also, my sister, I am sorely afraid to write about such sublime matters. For I have neither the insight nor the knowledge to expound them lucidly in English or Latin, and especially in the English language. For it is far beyond my ability to explain to you in any kind of vernacular the technicalities of theology.

Also, I judge myself unworthy to attain that spiritual discernment by means of which I might know or have true insight into what it is that doctors intend in their holy writings.

Taking into account these and many other causes, I am suitably cautious about writing.… But asking help from almighty God, through whose power the ass had speech with the prophet Balaam, according to your desire and to the extent that I dare or know, I will teach you about temptations in particular and general terms and about their remedies, along with certain other matters that relate easily to the subject; submitting myself always to the correction of wise people and scholars and people of spiritual understanding.)

(The Chastising of God’s Children, ca. 1390)

Contents

General Preface

Conventions

General Introduction: The Prophesying Ass: Patterns and Premises

1. Patterns: Reversal, Resistance, Reform

2. Premises: Continuity, Centrality, Distinctiveness

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

2. Vernacula Lingua: The Genealogy of a Term

Chapter 2. Anglican Historiography

1. The Elizabethans I: Foxe’s Actes and Monuments

2. Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries: James, Smith, Burnet, Froude

Chapter 3. Romantic Philology

1. Medievalism and Nationalism

2. The Early English Text Society

3. From Cambridge History of English Literature to Continuity of English Prose

Chapter 4. Catholic Apologetics

1. The Elizabethans II: Harpsfield, Sander, Stapleton, Harding

2. From Rheims New Testament to XVI Revelations of Divine Love

3. Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Bossuet, Fénelon, Butler, Gasquet

Chapter 5. Medieval Studies and Modernism

1. Three Renaissances and a Revolt

2. Neo-Thomism, Nouvelle Théologie, and the Second Vatican Council

3. English Studies and Medieval Religious Literature Since the 1930s

PART II. THE MEDIEVAL IDEA OF THE VERNACULAR: MODELS, TERMS, CONCEPTS

Chapter 6. Christian Teaching Across the Longue Durée

1. The Evangelical Imperative: Robert of Gretham’s Miroir

2. Cultural Change and Historical Explanation

Chapter 7. Theology and the Christian Community

1. Versions of Vernacular Theology

2. Genres of Vernacular Theology

Chapter 8. The Vernacular as a Clerical Construct

1. Artificial/Natural, Metalinguistic/Sociolinguistic

2. Unmarked/Marked, Esoteric/Exoteric

Chapter 9. Institutional Stance and Social Address

1. The Pastoral Model: Vulgar Tongue

2. The Communal Model: Common Tongue

3. The Patronal Model: Mother Tongue

Chapter 10. The Vernacular Archive

1. Shape, Phases, Rhythm

2. Life Cycles, Mobility, Loss

PART III. ENGLISH IN THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES: LANGUAGE POLITICS AND MONASTIC REFORM

Chapter 11. Old English in the Long Twelfth Century

1. Scholarly Translators and Monastic Bishops: Sanctus Beda was i-boren

2. A Call to Revival: The Tremulous Hand

3. Scholarly Rationales for Late Old English

4. Homiliaries and Other Genres

Chapter 12. The Benedictine Vernacular Canon I: Tenth Century

1. Imagined Benedictine Communities

2. Æthelwold: Glosses, Rules, Monastic Pedagogy (950–75)

Chapter 13. The Benedictine Vernacular Canon II: Eleventh Century

1. Ælfric: Homilies and Pastoral Letters (990–1010)

2. Wulfstan: Homilies, Law Codes, Political Theology (1000–1023)

3. Monastic Pastoralia Across the Eleventh Century

Chapter 14. English in Monastery, Minster, and Court

1. The Benedictine Dominance of the Textual Record

2. Problems of Evidence: Innovation or Continuity?

3. Blickling Homilies, Vercelli Homilies, Catholic Homilies

4. Court Writing in the Alfredian Tradition

Chapter 15. The Contradictions of Benedictine English

1. The Invention of Language Hierarchy

2. Carolingian Language Reform: Alcuin’s Attack on Vulgar Latin

3. European Language Politics and Old English Textuality

PART IV. FROM OLD ENGLISH TO EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH: CONTINUITY, ADAPTATION, SECULARIZATION

Chapter 16. The Narrowing of Written English

1. English in a Changing Sociolinguistic Environment

2. The Old English Apollonius at the Court of Cnut

3. Late Old English as a Sign of the Past

4. The Corpus of Early Middle English Before 1250

Chapter 17. The Transformation of Insular History

1. Reformulations of Kingship in The Proverbs of Alfred

2. The Modernity of Layamon’s Brut

Chapter 18. The New Pastoralia I: Secular Priests and Regular Canons

1. Pedagogical Ambition and Public Address

2. Navigating the World in Vices and Virtues

3. Willful Learning and the Orrmulum

Chapter 19. The New Pastoralia II: Diocesan Preaching Books

1. Monastic Pastoral Care in a Reorganized Church

2. The Lambeth Homilies and Worcester Cathedral Priory

3. The Trinity Homilies and St. Paul’s, London

Chapter 20. The New Pastoralia III: Anchoresses and the City

1. The Setting of Ancrene Wisse

2. The Audiences of the Ancrene Wisse Group

Coda to Volume 1

Appendix: Tables of Dates, Texts, and Persons

Notes

Bibliography

Index of Manuscripts

General Index

Acknowledgments

General Preface

For well over six 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 this role has still not been sufficiently recognized. As a result, our understanding of how Christianity shaped and informed the lives of individuals, communities, and polities across this long era is thinner than it needs to become, if the relationships between these bodies of writing, let alone their wider significance for literary and religious history, are to be adequately assessed and appreciated. Scholars of the English Middle Ages still lack any overarching analysis of how religious teachings and ways of thought and feeling were developed, deployed, and argued over at a societal level across the medieval centuries, or of how they were adapted across time to new institutional configurations, political situations, sensibilities, and audiences. Outside the field, a long-standing identification of medieval western European Christianity with the Latin language, and a lack of awareness about the variety and sheer quantity of vernacular religious writing that survives from the English Middle Ages, together mean that damaging misunderstandings about the era that have long been discredited are still in scholarly as well as general circulation.

Drawing on the labors of generations of editors and engaging synthetically with old and new scholarship in a number of fields, the three volumes of this book make a concerted effort to address this situation, and, if this can in fact be done, to help dislodge it. This project is carried out in several stages. The present volume opens in the medieval era, explaining the relationship between its title and its topic, setting out its premises, and offering a brief overview of the early English and broader European history of the terminology and idea of the vernacular. However, four of its first five chapters are set in the early modern and modern periods. These chapters explore the polemical but also structural role played by the medieval vernacular in the two opposed narratives about the Catholic Middle Ages and its Protestant repudiation that grew up out of the sixteenth-century reformations, and the strangely mutated forms in which these two narratives still survive, both for the few who study the medieval era and for the overwhelming majority who do not.

Because the staying power of these narratives makes a phenomenon that spans centuries, languages, and genres hard to see, let alone discuss as a coherent whole, five more chapters are then devoted to building the conceptual framework on which the rest of the book depends. Only then, at the halfway point of the first volume, does the book begin a detailed investigation of the nature and significance of this phenomenon, and of some number of the dozens of genres and thousands of individual writings, addressed to different audiences, from which it is made.

The final two groups of chapters in this volume and all its successor undertake the first and longer phase of this investigation. Working forward in time, although with a good number of backward eddies and crisscrossings of centuries, this part of the book builds a stage-by-stage account of how the writings that make up the medieval English vernacular religious archive were produced, the roles they played during the periods in which they were copied and used, and the processes by which they were displaced by new bodies of texts, in different genres, languages, or orthographic systems. This account also maps the changing attitudes of these texts toward Christian belief and teaching, political theology, Church governance, and the vernacular itself.

Paying special attention to the connections between religious history and the history of languages and to the institutional settings in which vernacular texts were written and circulated, these chapters show that the development of new forms of vernacular textuality in Old English, insular French, and Middle English took place as a result not only of language change as such but also of new understandings of the Church, the Christian community, and the relationship of both to secular government. As a result, the history of medieval England’s vernacular literatures needs to be understood within as much a theological and ecclesiastical as a linguistic, national, and political framework. The discussion moves freely across different kinds of texts and genres in verse and prose, taking an unusually broad view of what counts as theology in vernacular settings. In places, however, it puts a certain extra emphasis on a kind of writing whose medieval history has long been controversial and is still subject to misunderstanding, Bible translation.

The third and last volume turns to the content and literary qualities of the texts that make up the medieval English vernacular archive. Beginning with the answers different generations of thinkers gave to the urgent question of how many Christians (as well as others) will attain heaven, the chapters in this volume reconstruct how these texts engaged with two different models of believing identity and spiritual aspiration that medieval Christianity inherited from Late Antiquity: one communitarian, penitential, and practical; the other perfectionist, ascetic, and often affective. They trace the difficult dialogues that developed between these models as they moved out from their respective bases in the secular and religious wings of the institutional Church into Christian society more broadly by means of vernacular genres aimed at lay readerships. Focusing on instructional and pedagogical writings on the one hand, and works of information, imagination, and contemplation on the other, and shuttling between texts and settings that assume different accounts of Christian personhood, they also consider how such writings used these models, and the tensions between them, to reflect on the self, history, society and government, the natural world, and God, as well as on the literary self-understanding and roles of the various kinds of narrative representation we would now be likely to call fiction.

Even though the part vernacular religious writings played within medieval textual and intellectual culture was often thought of as ancillary, especially by the learned, it will become clear that these writings did a great deal more than to present normative Christian teachings to the unlearned majority, important though this function was. Addressed to audiences neither wholly familiar with the Latin writings that shaped the thinking of their learned contemporaries nor wholly bound by them, these writings extend the range of what could be believed, thought, or felt within the structures of the faith and occasionally set out to modify or challenge them. Vernacular textuality was never separate from its Latin counterpart. But until its capacities and roles within the larger textual system have been acknowledged and explored, so the book argues, there can be no sufficient account of medieval Christian thought and culture. Nor can there be a sufficient account of the medieval centuries within the history of Britain and of Europe.

Taken as a whole, Balaam’s Ass shows how the study of the English vernacular religious archive, in all its fluidity and complexity, contributes to our understanding of Christian theology, social thought, imagination, and practice across the medieval centuries. In the process, it develops an account of the archive’s significance for the wider history of western knowledge and belief. On a large scale, the book shows how the vernacular archive complicates our understanding of periodization, in relation not only to the sixteenth-century divide that is usually understood to exist between the medieval era and the renaissance or reformation, but also to the twelfth-century divide between the early and late medieval, acknowledging neither with the clarity we have come to anticipate. It further shows how the archive complicates accounts of the history of secularization, challenging intellectual models that treat the category of the secular as a simple antonym of the religious, rather as the modern is treated as a simple antonym of the medieval.

More locally, the book demonstrates the value of treating the vernacular as a category and subject of interest in its own right, this despite the vital presence, throughout the medieval centuries, of the learned language, Latin, and the pervasive influence of text and ideas written in Latin on texts in vernacular languages, through translation, adaptation, and citation.

The book joins two related bodies of work in religious studies, one of which explores the crucial roles played by the members of Christian society as a whole, not merely the educated and powerful, in religious history, while the other reconstructs the history of the Latin pastoral texts, many of them meant for vernacular delivery, that aimed to enable and shape these roles. The book also joins two other bodies of work in literary studies, one of which investigates the long career of Old English religious writing after the Norman Conquest and its close relationship to early Middle English, while the other considers the key cultural role, over some three hundred years, of written insular French. At certain moments, the book additionally contributes somewhat vociferously to the still-vexed scholarly conversations about the nature of English religious and literary culture in the century and a half before the Henrician Reformation of the 1530s. Throughout, it argues for the centrality of Christian thought, practice, and affective, imaginative, and institutional engagements to the multilingual entity that is early English literary history.

Although Balaam’s Ass engages with a number of disciplines, including social history, Church history, and the history of ideas, this book is primarily a work of literary history. Its approach to the medieval past is thus organized around texts, books, genres, languages, ideas, authors, and real or implied audiences rather than events, institutions, belief systems, and societies, crucial as all these are to its interests. While the book’s scope means that it can discuss a single text or writer in detail only occasionally, and while it takes care not to fall into postures imitative of medieval Christian belief, its attitude toward these diverse witnesses aspires to be that of the sympathetic embedded observer. It takes for granted that even the most derivative of the texts it discusses were intelligently attentive to the situations for which they were written, and are more than mere adaptations of earlier writings that happened to be available at a given time or place, and more than dogged collections of improving commonplaces with no purchase on actual lives and situations.

This trusting attitude has its dangers. One of these is the danger of lapsing into a merely apologetic or partisan attitude, siding with medieval authors, texts, and readers in their struggles, or giving the appearance of doing so, especially when their values appear to mirror those of the book’s imagined readership or those of the author. Another is the danger of misjudging the gap between rhetoric and social reality in texts that announce themselves as written for the Christian community at large, but are in practice mainly meant for specific, often privileged constituencies, quietly mirroring their localized concerns and interests. In recent years, scholarship on medieval Christian texts that takes them at their idealizing word, whether by accepting as true their often fiercely prejudiced analyses of the state of contemporary society and its institutions, or by downplaying their many contributions to the ongoing Western history of sexual, social, racial, economic, and environmental injustice and violence, has been subject to proper critique.

Yet to remain attentive to local detail as well as larger patterns, garnering all that can be learned about different bodies of writing from close reading, literary historians of these distant but still reverberant religious materials have little choice but to seek a balance between what cultural and linguistic anthropologists term etic (outside in) and emic (inside out) methods of analysis.¹ Offering all the texts, genres, ideas, persons, and cultural situations under investigation at least a hypothetical respect, we must make the effort to view matters, however temporarily, as these diverse witnesses appear once to have viewed them, and invite readers, however warily and with whatever mental reservations, to do the same. Literary and historical study in the humanist mode practiced in this book is ultimately grounded in juridical protocols. Taking testimony from many hundreds of subjects and interested parties, it reaches its conclusions on the basis of a balanced assessment of probabilities that, more often than not, stops well short of certainty, then sets out to build a consensus with readers (the self-selected group the book sometimes refers to provisionally as we) that the evidence itself supports but cannot compel. This is an open-ended and in many ways an inherently problematic, however necessary, process.

The analyses that follow may still strike some as taking the texts they treat too much on their own idealizing and ideologizing terms. Conversely, the absence of close attention here to nontextual media of religious teaching, including images, image-texts, song, and performance, and the often spare treatment (over the first two volumes) given narrative and devotional genres, may strike some as producing a thin and overly intellectualized account of vernacular religious culture. Book historians may wonder at the emphasis on the study of texts, rather than the books that contain them, and language historians at the lack of sensitivity to issues of dialect. Most recent advances in the field have come from the detailed study of topics such as these.

However, to have thickened the texture of the book further would have risked confusing what is already a multifaceted argument. A history of vernacular religious writing must take into account the entire working career of texts and genres, rather than consider them only in relation to the contexts that produced them. It must also try to consider the evidence offered by the full range of writings. But it needs to give first priority to those moments when textual production was at its most prolific, and to texts that best help us grasp what was at stake at these moments. While these texts run the gamut from religious rules to lyrics, and from history and hagiography to polemics and imaginative fictions, in practice this priority often requires us to attend most carefully to pastoral and pedagogical texts, including sermons, catecheses, forms of living, and Bible translations, where the stakes of religious writing and teaching tend to be at their clearest.

As Sheldon Pollock stated fifteen years ago in The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India, by far the most significant work on early vernacular languages so far published: the vernacularization of Europe as a literary-cultural process in itself and, even more so, in relation to political processes remains one of the great understudied topics of Western history.² As yet, Europeanists cannot be said to have risen to the provocation issued by this sentence. But after two centuries of nation-based academic study, European vernacularity is at long last being treated as a comparative topic in books and research projects that range across centuries, polities, and language groups. There is a great deal to be said for this comparative internationalist approach, both in its own right and because it offers an alternative to nation-based studies of the vernacular at a time when ethnicity-based nationalisms are making a sinister reappearance in different parts of the world, along with their crude and in some cases violent co-optations of the nineteenth-century tradition of Romantic philology.³

Yet because of the historical depth of the English vernacular record, the narrower focus adopted here enables comparative analysis of a different kind: across the languages and cultures of a single, evolving polity. The localization of this study also makes it possible to confront an influential example of the ideology that long underlay scholarship both of European vernaculars and of their South Asian and other counterparts. This is the nationalist and imperialist ideology that formed around the story of England across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with its agonistic account of the medieval vernacular as a symbol of national resistance to ecclesiastical domination in pursuit of an imagined liberty whose contours in practice almost always mirrored the political and economic interests of the governing classes. At different times and different ways, this historical narrative has intersected with both the project of British global colonialism and its decolonizing aftermath.⁴

The book does not give equal space to each phase of its story, which is told in such a way as to give extra weight to three critical periods, the several decades on either side of the years 1000, 1200, and 1400, and to devote more concentrated attention to the phases of Middle English writing than it does to Old English or insular French, fundamental as both languages are to its concerns. There should still be enough here to enable comparison across the several generations of texts covered by this study, and to give future scholars of the medieval European vernaculars a firmer basis on which to build the synthetic accounts that are ultimately needed.

Conventions

This book hopes to reach readers who are not medievalists, as well as medievalists who are not students of England’s vernacular languages. Despite the case that can be made for preserving the full range of local spelling systems and other features of manuscript presentation against the centralizing tendencies of orthographic normalization, the book presents its texts accordingly.

Quotations from medieval and early modern works thus expand abbreviations and normalize word division and certain spellings in the direction of standard modern usage. Those from insular French (as well as Latin) regularize i/j, u/v and c/t. Less usually, those from Old English regularize the runic letters eth (ð) = th, thorn (þ) = th, yogh (ȝ) = y, g, etc., and wynn (ƿ) = w, and hyphenate the past participle prefix ge-. Ash (Æ/æ) = is retained. Those from Middle English follow both these sets of conventions. They additionally regularize vocalic y to i, and terminal i to y; shorten double letters to single, except when doubled in modern spelling; normalize qu- to wh-, sch and, when appropriate, s to sh, v to f, final -ys to -es and final -z and -tz to -s. For reasons that will become clear, an exception is made for the Orrmulum. Individual spellings may also be adjusted, for example, by doubling single -e to distinguish the from thee. Punctuation and capitalization are modernized, with exceptions that include quotations from early printed texts. Caesuras in alliterative and septenary verse are marked with a space.

Quotations, modified in these ways, are from existing editions when possible. Those from medieval languages are translated, except in the case of many quotations from Middle English, where individual words and phrases are glossed. Translations make grateful use of the published translations cited in the notes as a courtesy to the reader but often differ from them silently in matters of detail, especially in the case of older translations, and in some cases are entirely new.

Editorial emendations are for the most part accepted silently. Emendations to quotations from manuscripts or early printed sources are noted. Choices of editions may be eclectic, where choices exist. Standard editions of any text discussed in detail are consulted (and noted in the Bibliography), but references may be to editions more friendly to readers. For Old English, this now often means the parallel-text editions in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, which are used where possible, along with their excellent translations, most of which are here followed faithfully. In quotations from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts, an original edition may also be preferred to a modern scholarly edition with modernized spellings.

Conventional modern titles for works with no fixed title are often used without comment. Occasional medieval titles not used by modern scholars are restored (such as Hierdeboc, King Alfred’s title for the work always known as his Pastoral Care). Where appropriate, translations of titles are added in brackets; these are not intended to reference titles of published translations. Date ranges of composition suggested in the text should be understood as approximate. Biblical allusions are identified in the text in parentheses, references normally following the numbering systems of the Latin Vulgate Bible (Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam). This means that many psalm numberings differ by one from those of other versions; for example, Psalm 51 in early modern and modern versions of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer ("Miserere me Deus. Have mercy upon me, O God") is Psalm 50 in the Vulgate. Biblical quotations are sometimes given from one or another medieval Bible translation, especially the Late Version of The Middle English Bible.

In order to save space, references in the notes are shortened, following different conventions for primary and secondary works. Primary and secondary works are then listed separately in the Bibliography.

Primary works are initially cited by author (when known), shortened title, and editor, followed by a reference to a modern English translation, if one exists. Subsequent citations are abbreviated. Unless otherwise stated, references in the format II.3 are to book and chapter; in the format 32.15–17 to page and line number; and in the format 323 to page number only. Other kinds of subdivision (by vol., part, col., quaestio, distinctio, passus, sec., line, etc.) are spelled out, rather than following the shorthand systems in use in relevant disciplines. Translations are usually listed in the bibliography immediately after the work they translate.

Secondary works are cited by author/editor, date, and where relevant, page, except in the case of certain reference books and online sources. These are cited in abbreviated forms itemized in the Bibliography. References to existing scholarship are plentiful but necessarily selective.

The Appendix includes several time lines and other charts, tagged to sections of text.

Writing about Christian history involves severe terminological difficulties. Many terms standard in the field either derive directly from Christian history and ecclesiology and so bring judgments of an unavoidably theological character in their wake or, no less problematically, preserve the oppositions that underlie those judgments in secular-sounding forms. Despite the awkwardnesses involved, this book thus takes some pains not to describe texts, authors, persons, communities, or doctrinal positions as orthodox, heterodox, or heretical on the one hand, or conservative, traditional, mainstream, dissenting, or radical on the other. However carefully used, both sets of terms make it difficult to avoid taking implied de facto positions in theological and ecclesiological debates that were still in progress during the era under consideration, when discussion of religious truth and authority remained fluid. Their scholarly overuse also gives undue emphasis to the normative as such, as though the key question to be asked of any religious text or idea always involves its conformity or otherwise to whatever is understood as standard teaching. For reasons that become clear in Volume 2, the book takes particular care not to refer directly to individuals, texts, or religious stances as either Lollard or Wycliffite except when reporting language used at the time or by other scholars.

However, the book does invoke or adapt medieval terms for certain large institutional structures and processes, even when modern usage differs. Despite subjecting the concept and the ideological work it carries out to scrutiny, it often invokes the term reform, even while acknowledging that the specifically ecclesiological meanings of this work developed only during the twelfth century. It generally uses the word secular, not as an antonym for religious in the general modern sense, but to distinguish the secular Church (bishops, priests, laypeople) from the regular orders (monks, nuns, canons, friars), or to refer to secular or lay society, which includes the secular clergy (parish priests and others with spiritual responsibility toward their congregations) among its many members. Although this institutional meaning was not always taken for granted during the medieval era, it often uses the term religious to refer to members of the regular orders, living under a rule. The term clerisy sometimes refers to all Latinate persons. Theology, used somewhat idiosyncratically, is discussed in Chapter Seven.

Depending on context, the capitalized term Church may refer either to the entire body of baptized Christian believers (or to those in England, in Christian Europe, or across the known world), grouped into the categories that pertained during the period; to the subsection of those believers taken to be predestined to eternal salvation, whose membership is often held to be unknowable; or to the idea of the Church, in both its militant (earthly) and its triumphant (transcendent) forms, on opposite sides of death and Judgment. Except when the confessional Churches of the post-medieval centuries are in question, this abstract entity (which, for medieval English Christians, included the Greek, Syriac, Coptic, and Ethiopic Churches, among others) is also the usual referent of the terms Catholic or Catholic Church (alluding to the original meaning of Latin catholica, universal). Only in the phrases institutional Church, Western Church, and so on does Church refer to an ecclesiastical hierarchy with the pope at its apex, either at the local (English) or international (western European) levels, and acting in concert with or opposition to other centers of ecclesiastical power, such as monasteries, convents, friaries, or universities. Although the book acknowledges the theological and affective weight of this identification, it is careful not to equate the Church with the (Western) institutional Church, or the institutional Church with the Catholic Church, since the nature of these relationships was often in question during the medieval centuries themselves. Like the divide between orthodox and heterodox, indeed, they are part of our story.

Because the book discusses a number of movements of reform or reformation (both of which translate the Latin word reformatio), these two words are left uncapitalized except as part of a conventional scholarly name for a relatively localized event or movement: Benedictine Reform, Gregorian Reform, Henrician Reformation, English Reformation, or Protestant Reformation. No specific term is used for the Catholic Counter-Reformation, arising from the Council of Trent (1545–63), although sixteenth-century reform movements as a whole are referred to as the sixteenth-century reformations. The terms medieval, renaissance, humanism, and scholasticism are also left uncapitalized. The period of division between rival popes that lasted from 1378 to circa 1417 is termed the Papal Schism.

Decisions about other kinds of terminology can also be awkward. The tripartite terms medieval, early modern, and modern are used merely conventionally, although they are also subjected to scrutiny. The period covered by the book has sometimes to be named the Middle Ages, but is also referred to as the medieval centuries or medieval era, this last tautologous but necessary, especially in contexts involving the modern era or modernity. Like much recent writing in the field of medieval studies, this book has a necessarily unresolved relationship with this terminology, which once again is effectively part of its subject-matter.

The tripartite division of English into Old, Middle, and Modern is also conventional. It bears stressing both that the divide between Old and early Middle English is partly arbitrary and that late Middle English derived thousands of words from insular French, bequeathing these words to Modern English. Old English, like its early Middle English successor, is a Germanic language. Late Middle and Modern English are in many ways hybrids of Germanic and Romance. Insular French is the name here given the dialect of French traditionally referred to as Anglo-Norman, despite the qualms some have expressed about the word insular. It may also refer to French texts in medieval English circulation in other dialects. The newer term of art proposed by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (2009b), French of England, is also used. Although the book’s setting is the island of Britain, the texts on which it focuses for the most part derive from areas of the island where dialects of English, and at some periods French, were the main spoken languages, alongside languages not discussed here, Norse, Welsh, Cornish, and Hebrew. With some complications, especially in relation to Wales, these areas roughly correspond to the two ecclesiastical provinces of Canterbury and York. Although its status as a polity, let alone nation, changed over time, the book calls this region England, bearing in mind that this term already had strong affective resonances by the twelfth century, of which it is once again necessary to be properly wary. The peoples long referred to as Anglo-Saxon are here the early English.

Finally, the text that has come to be known as the Wycliffite Bible over the past hundred years is here called The Middle English Bible. The word archive is used to refer generically to the surviving corpus of insular vernacular religious works, physically spread across hundreds of institutional archives maintained by some tens of thousands of actual archivists, present and past, whose labors are quite as important to this book as the labors of editors, translators, and other scholars. The term sociolinguistic may be used to refer to the ideological relationships between corpora of written languages, in imitation of Roger Wright’s coinage sociophilological (R. Wright 2002). The adjective and noun vernacular is discussed in Chapters One and Eight.

General Introduction

The Prophesying Ass: Patterns and Premises

1. Patterns: Reversal, Resistance, Reform

וַתֹּאמֶר הָאָתוֹן אֶל-בִּלְעָם הֲלוֹא אָנֹכִי אֲתֹנְךָ אֲשֶׁר-רָכַבְתָּ עָלַי מֵעוֹדְךָ עַד-הַיּוֹם הַזֶּה הַהַסְכֵּן הִסְכַּנְתִּי לַעֲשׂוֹת לְךָ כֹּה וַיֹּאמֶר לֹא

καὶ λέγει ἡ ὄνος τῷ Βαλααµ Οὐκ ἐγὼ ἡ ὄνος σου, ἐφ’ ἧς ἐπέβαινες ἀπὸ νεότητός σου ἕως τῆς σήµερον ἡµέρας; µὴ ὑπεροράσει ὑπεριδοῦσα ἐποίησά σοι οὕτως; ὁ δὲ εἶπεν Οὐχί.

dixit asina nonne animal tuum sum cui semper sedere consuesti usque in præsentem diem dic quid simile umquam fecerim tibi at ille ait numquam

The asse said: Am not I thy beast, on which thou hast beene alwayes accustomed to ride until this present day? Tell me what like thing did I ever to thee. But he said: Never.¹

By turns cruel, comic, and gnomic, the story of Balaam’s ass that lends this book its title is a story of confusion, violence, and astonishment, as the categories that structure daily existence, separating self and other, friend and enemy, human and beast are temporarily shattered by a sudden incursion from the transcendent.² Quoted here in all three of western Christendom’s linguae sacrae, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, as well as in the Douay translation of 1609–10, the story is also retold in various forms in all three of medieval England’s major vernacular languages.

Summoned by a desperate King Balaak to curse the Israelites, as they continue their lethal advance on the Moabites during the campaign to invade Canaan, the prophet Balaam, sitting astride his ass, three times fails to see what the ass herself sees clearly: an angel standing in the way with a sword drawn, ready to strike. Se assa ge-seah thone engel standende and Balaam ne ge-seah (the ass saw the waiting angel and Balaam did not see it; Num. 22:23). So the Old English Heptateuch sets the scene, in a translation from the Vulgate made around the year 1000 and illustrated by artists in Canterbury for unknown patrons a decade or two later, one of the few illuminated Old Testament books to survive from the early medieval centuries.³

The ass swerves aside three times, this way and that, bruising Balaam’s foot, crushing him against a wall, then buckling beneath him, terrified but obstinate, as the angel moves again and again to intercept. Each time, her angry master beats her flanks bloody but cannot make her go forward. Sovent la fert e bat d’escurgee / … Tant l’ad batue li veillard qu’il est las (he struck her often and beat her with a scourge; the old fool hit her so much that he was exhausted), in the words of the decasyllabic Poème Anglo-Normand sur l’Ancien Testament around the end of the twelfth century. This is one of several insular French and Middle English accounts of the episode written for members of the literate lay and their householders (a lais escrif) that find ways to highlight Balaam’s bodily violence toward an animal who is also female and a bonded servant.⁴

Finally the ass, bleeding and still prone, is moved to utter an unprecedented and divinely inspired verbal complaint. "And God undede (opened) this asses muth! / So soth (true) it is! So it is selcuth!" (wondrous), marvels a verse couplet paraphrase of parts of the Pentateuch called Genesis and Exodus in the later thirteenth century, drawing on an account of the episode in Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica written some seventy-five years earlier.⁵

This is how her exchange with Balaam then proceeds in the Early Version of The Middle English Bible, the first translation of the whole Bible into English prose, likely from the 1370s:

And the Lord openide the mouth of the asse and she spak: "What have I do (done) to thee? Why smitist thou me, lo now, the thridde time?"

Balaam answerde: "For (because) thou hast deservide, and bigilide (tricked) me. Wold God I hadde a swerd, that I mighte smite thee!"

And the asse seide: "Whethir I am not (am I not) thy beeste, to the which (on which) evermore thou were wont to sitte unto the day that is now? Sey, what thing lik ever I dide to thee? And he seith, Never."⁶

Burnel, the she-ass in the Chester Play of Balaam, regularly performed in the city streets between at least the early 1500s and the 1570s, voices the injured justice of the second speech still more strongly, again using the intimate thou of the servant as she insists that her conduct has, as always, been proper. It is Balaam who has gone violently and shamefully astray:

Am not I, maister, thy owne asse

to beare thee whither thou will passe (wherever you want to go),

and many winter readye was?

To smite me hit (it) is shame.

Thou wottest (know) well, maister, perdee (by God),

that thou haddest never non like to me,

ne never yet (before) soe served I thee.

Now am I not to blame.⁷

Only when Balaam has conceded the truth of her words does God open his eyes, showing him that, in resisting his urgings, she has saved his life. The angel reveals its presence, repeating the ass’s accusation, and Balaam understands at last that he has sinned. The Great Bible of 1539, whose production for use in church services was mandated by Henry VIII in 1538, words their conversation like this:

And the aungel of the Lord saide unto him: "Wherfore (why) haste thou smitten thine asse thre times? Beholde, I came oute as an adversary, because thou makest thy waye contrary unto me. And the asse sawe me, and went back fro me thre times, or els if she had not turned fro me (geving place to me that stode in the waye), I had suerly slaine the, and saved her alive."

Balaam saide unto the angel of the Lorde: "I have sinned, for I wist (knew) not that thou stodest in the waye against me. Now, therfore, if it displease the I will turne home againe."⁸

Even before she briefly receives the miraculous gift of human speech, before returning to her life of alert, suffering beasthood, the ass proves herself wiser than her learned master.

Not surprisingly, given the twists and turns of the episode in which she plays her role, Balaam’s ass bears the burden of many meanings in Christian patristic and medieval thought. According to the opinions synthesized by the Glossa ordinaria, the large commentary compiled in the early twelfth century and laid out in the margins of many Latin Bible books well into the print era, there is virtually no hope for Balaam himself.⁹ This is so despite his reluctant obedience to God, his inability to curse the Israelites on Balaak’s behalf after his encounter with the angel, and the prophesy of the incarnation he finds himself uttering instead: "I shal se him, but not now; I shal biholde him, but not nigh (near); a sterre shal be borun of (born from) Jacob, and a yerde (staff) shal rise of Israel" (Num. 24:17), in the suitably mystifying rendering of the Late Version of The Middle English Bible. The Late Version was revised from the Early Version, probably during the first half of the 1380s, and was still in circulation in the early sixteenth century.

While the Glossa acknowledges that Balaam remains an ambivalent figure, who appears almost capable of virtue, the general consensus of the work’s patristic sources, drawing on early Jewish exegetical traditions whose influence is also evident in the Christian New Testament, is that his prophetic ability was magical, not holy, involving sacrifice to demons, not worship of the one God (see 2 Pet. 2:15, Jude 11, Rev. 2:14).¹⁰ Understanding Balaam’s inability to see the angel as proof of his merely carnal understanding, the linguistically gifted Franciscan exegete Nicholas of Lyra (d. 1349), whose commentary became a free-standing addition to Bibles containing the Glossa, takes the same view. With his usual concern for the priorities of the literal sense, Lyra declares that Balaam was a demonic prophet … seeking revelations from the demons (Balaam fuit propheta dæmonum … quærens revelationes a dæmonibus).¹¹

For Origen (d. 253), the most influential of the Glossa’s sources for Numbers (in the Latin adaptation of his In Numeros homiliae by the early fifth-century theologian Rufinus), Balaam foreshadows the scribes and Pharisees who resisted Christ.¹² Since Balaam’s name can be taken to mean vain people (populus vanus), this typological equivalence fixes his identity as potentially signifying any cleric who has the word of God not in his heart but in his mouth ("verbum Dei non in corde sed in ore"; see Isa. 29:13), an idolator and lover of money.¹³

As a result, Balaam’s learned perversity casts into bolder relief the virtues of his ass, who absorbs many of her master’s potentially positive features into her own—and does so despite a general indifference on the part of scholarly theologians to the violence between master and servant that preoccupies vernacular accounts of the scene. For Isidore (d. 636), the ass signifies the brutish gentiles (bruta gentilitas) who at last threw off the seductor idolatriae of paganism at the coming of Christ, and by extension the Christian Church, which this heroic act was humanly instrumental in bringing into being.¹⁴ Anticipating and no doubt informing Isidore’s line of thinking, Origen notices that the Church is figured elsewhere in the Christian Bible by a second ass, who bore Christ into Jerusalem (Matt. 21:1–11). The resonance between these asses, one antetype, the other her typological fulfillment, reminds us that, in the supersessionary logic of Christian exegesis Origen helped install—in which Christian meanings of the Hebrew scriptures that were known neither to their human authors nor to their early reception communities displace their first meanings—Jesus sits where Balaam once sat: on an ass that is no longer the Jews but the Christian Church.¹⁵

Always more naturalistic than Origen, Augustine finds the ass interesting primarily as an example of a virtuous talking animal, and as evidence that the gift of prophesy may be transitory. The implications of his analysis for language study are laid out in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia (on vernacular eloquence) early in the fourteenth century. Following Augustine (perhaps by way of Aquinas, whose views are later echoed by Lyra), Dante disappointingly maintains that the ass herself was not speaking at all, merely an angel through the mouth of the ass.¹⁶ The Glossa, still following Origen, largely ignores Augustine’s scientific account but also reads the story as a language miracle.¹⁷ Here the emphasis lies on the ass as a figure of nonrational innocence, whose preternatural speech reminds us that God makes foolish the wisdom of the wise (as Isaiah and Paul join in affirming: Isa. 29:14; 1 Cor. 1:19–20), and turns the stone the builder has rejected into the head of the corner (as the Psalmist and Peter unite in adding: Ps. 117:22, 1 Pet. 2:7).

Even as Origen works the episode into a further proof that God has abandoned the old, Israel in the flesh (in carne Istrahel) in favor of the new Israel in Christ (in Christo Istrahel),¹⁸ reversing its polarities from the perspective of what would become Rabbinic Judaism, he and his successors are thus also identifying what is perhaps the most important pattern Christianity has taken from its Old Testament, and that the forty-year story of the journey to the Promised Land told in Numbers writes large (Sefer Bamidbar, the book in the wilderness, in Hebrew).¹⁹ This is the pattern of reversal itself: a recurrent feature of God’s dealings with his people and their enemies in Jewish and Christian traditions. God reaches into history with the strength of his arm and compels it to serve his purposes, scattering the proud in the imaginations of their hearts and casting down the mighty from their seats, even as he exalts the humble and meek (see Luke 1:51–52):

He dide mihte on earme his. He tostencte overmode of mode hortan his.

Fecit potentiam in bracio suo. Dispersit superbos mente cordis sui.

He asette wlance of setle, and he up sette eadmode.

Deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles.

(He performed strong deeds with his arm. He scattered the proud in their hearts’ minds. He deposed the powerful from their place and raised up the humble.)²⁰

Sung by a pregnant Mary to a pregnant cousin Elizabeth at the turning point of Christian sacred history, and quoted here from a tenth-century glossed Psalm book linked to one of England’s oldest female religious houses, Wilton Abbey, these words from the Magnificat distil a major theme of the tradition of doxology assembled in the Hebrew Psalter (Tehillim).²¹

As a signature of Christian as well as Jewish exegesis, historiography, and social thought, versions of the pattern of reversal involving the overthrow of the powerful that causes Mary to magnify her God can be traced with some regularity in the surviving vernacular and Latin Christian writings from medieval England. The pattern infuses accounts of sacred history from scripture composed in poetry or prose and read, preached, meditated on, imaged, sung, or acted across the era, as it may do the interpretation of secular history in chronicles, as they seek to account for a world of violence and disruption. Texts composed in different centuries, languages, and genres, and from different institutional positions, also show how the pattern shapes the self-understanding of the Church, as this imagined community negotiates this same world, during the long, perilous interval between Christ’s first coming and his second. Despite the strong concern with recurrence that informs Christian understandings of time in relation to the liturgical year, the conviction that the order of things must undergo sudden overthrow in the future, as it already and gloriously has in the past, lends this writing both a distinctive dynamism and an unnerved sense of its own instability.

Analyses of the Balaam story proliferate across the centuries. With the psychological acuity that typifies his writings, Gregory the Great’s Regula pastoralis (pastoral rule, ca. 590) develops an influential homiletic account of the ass’s speech as signifying how the flesh, in its very obduracy, may sometimes play a constructive role in the lives of fallen humans.²² The Old English translation of his treatise entitled simply Hierdeboc (shepherd’s book), issued by King Alfred of Wessex to his bishops around 890 and a foundational work of the early English prose tradition, renders Gregory’s words with all its usual precision and reverent concern for lucidity:

Baloham thonne ful georne feran wolde thær hine mon bæd, ac his estfulnesse witteah se esol the he onuppan sæt. Thæt wæs forthæmthe se assa ge-seah thone engel ongean hine standan, and him thæs færeltes forwiernan, thone the thæt mennisce mod ge-seon ne meahte. Swa eac, thonne thæt flæsc bith ge-let mid sumum broce, hit getacnath thæm mode for thære swingan hwæt Godes willa bith.

(Balaam would very eagerly have journeyed where it was commanded him, but his enthusiasm was resisted by the ass he was sitting on. That was because the ass saw the angel standing against him and forbidding his journey, which the human reason could not see. So also, when the flesh is hindered by any kind of pain, it signifies to the reason, by means of that scourging, what is God’s will.)²³

In his epistle to the Galatians, Paul argues pessimistically that the fleish coveitith ayens the spirit, and the spirit ayen the fleish, both each other’s enemies (Gal. 5:17).²⁴ Here, the flæsc, even if it appears to be acting against the interests and purposes of the mennisce mode, remains its loyal servant, communicating with it through physical and spiritual suffering if it should go astray. All devout Christians, in this account, become a composite of Balaam and ass—a symbolically male rational faculty putatively used to rule, and a symbolically female body putatively used to obey—when the experience of suffering recalls them to a state of humble mindfulness toward God.

Three hundred years after Alfred, the Latin De nugis curialium (on courtiers’ trifles), by the noted courtier, raconteur, and archdeacon of Oxford Walter Map (d. 1209–10), inaugurates what may be a new, self-referential reading of the episode, later taken up by vernacular writers, from the mid-thirteenth-century insular French homilist, Robert of Gretham, to the anonymous author of The Chastising of God’s Children, quoted in the epigraph to this book.²⁵ Spurred into writing by his patron, just as Balaam spurred the ass into unwilling speech, Map claims he is unlikely to be able to utter much more than noise. Still, if his book turns out to make an ass out of a man you wanted to make into a poet he warns (de homine asinum, quem debueras facere poetam), the shame will only rebound, as the hollow-headedness of my hee haws has you held hilarious (me ruditus ruditas ridiculum reddiderit, mimicking a bray).²⁶ The overblown modesty of this witty passage introduces the ass to the provincial realm of twelfth-century ecclesiastical politics. In the confessedly nugatory book that preserves his brayings, Map on the one hand satirizes the monastic orders, with their supposedly shameful histories; on the other, the ignorant laity who follow Peter Waldo (Waldenses), with their glossed psalters and French Bible books (lingua conscriptum Gallica, in quo textus et glosa Psalterii plurimorumque legis utriusque librorum continebantur). In the process, he advertises the new prestige and pretensions of the educated secular clergy, of whom he was one.²⁷

Treatments of the Balaam story like Map’s show how its meanings came to serve purposes in which the pattern of reversal has become localized, bearing a load whose weight may seem better suited to the back of a mere ass than the crushing historiographic burden laid on it by Origen. Yet the tenacity of Christian textuality is such that, once set in place, the revolutionary potential of the episode could never be fully contained, either at an exegetical level or in relation to real events. Throughout the patristic and medieval centuries, the episode continued to be used to urge action in the moment, as individual and groups inspired by the ideal shape of sacred history disruptively set out to realize that shape within their own societies. Here, too, vernacular works played an important role. Well before the Middle Ages ended, indeed, arguments over what the ass’s speech signified, based on exegetical traditions that now stretched back over a millennium, had become bound up with arguments over the appropriate uses of the religious vernacular itself.

Exhorting his readers to embrace martyrdom, perhaps during the Decian persecution in the 250s, the Carthaginian bishop Cyprian promises those unsure how to confess their faith in public that God will give them the words. After all, it is not hard for God to open the mouth of someone devoted to him, who made the ass speak against Balaam the prophet, in the Book of Numbers (Nec difficile est deo aperire os hominis devoti sibi, … qui in Numeris adversus Balaam prophetam etiam asinam fecerit loqui).²⁸ For Cyprian, as not quite entirely for Origen, Balaam and the ass contend with one another, effectively, as members of opposed belief systems.

By the early 700s, however, when the great Northumbrian theologian Bede wrote his innovative commentary on the Catholic Epistles, Balaam is clearly a Christian, one who loves the wages of iniquity (mercedem iniquitatis, 2 Pet. 2:15). More specifically, he is a cleric, whose sins may be so severe as to be subject to just discipline even by the laity (a laicis clerici merito lacerentur), in the same way that Balaam was disciplined by the words spoken, against the order of nature, by the ass (qui verbis asinae contra naturam loquentis corripitur; see 2 Pet. 2:16).²⁹

Bede’s insistence that, despite seeming canonical impropriety, laypeople have a duty to correct the clergy if they err perhaps reflects the anxieties of living in the theologically plural environment of early Christian England, as well as the idiosyncratic organization of the early English Church, structured at this period around minsters (monasteries) that seem sometimes to have doubled as residences for their lay founders. These wealthy rulers are perhaps the laicis whom he compares here to the unnaturally speaking ass.³⁰ But Bede’s foregrounding of the allusion to the Balaam story in 2 Peter had lasting significance. After Bede, Balaam and his ass continue to be identified for the most part with figures within the Christian Church.³¹ The ass, Origen’s figure of divine reversal and Cyprian’s of resistance, has become a figure of reform.

In the mid-twelfth century, not too long before the outset of the great battle between the crown and the episcopate for control of the English Church inaugurated by Henry II (d. 1189) and his onetime chancelor Archbishop Thomas Becket (d. 1170), Bede’s analysis is quoted at length in Gratian’s Decretum (ca. 1140). Bede is the work’s sole authority on those situations in which the learned may properly be reproved by the unlearned, the clergy by the laity (Docti ab indoctis, clerici a laicis quandoque merito reprehenduntur).³² Since the Decretum was hugely influential, this guaranteed the pertinence of this early English analysis in discussions of a particularly sensitive topic.

For Gratian, there is nothing objectionable in Bede’s account. Gratian cites him as part of a longer discussion of the sacerdotal office, which argues that moral living, not official dignity, makes a bishop a bishop (dignitas non facit episcopum, sed vita),³³ encouraging a reading of the episode in which subordinates (subditi) may properly offer resistance to their superiors in any situation in which the latter are seen to err (hoc exemplo possunt resistere suis praelatis si eis perceperint errare).³⁴ One of Gratian’s earliest English users, John of Salisbury, also agrees with Bede, although his concern is with a subject’s right to criticize a secular ruler. Balaam will not be corrected unless the ass can speak (Balaam etenim non corripitur, nisi asina loquatur), he declares in his Polycraticus around 1160, with a forthrightness characteristic of the household of Becket’s archiepiscopal predecessor, Theobold, of which he and Becket were both members.³⁵

Forty years later, however, as the spiritual movements that sprang up across the twelfth century came into conflict with the reforms pioneered by Innocent III, the great architect of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, serious anxiety has begun to set in. For Innocent, in his letter Cum ex iniuncto, addressed to clergy in the newly republicanized city of Metz, the ass’s speech must not be understood to justify criticism of priests by disciples of the layman Peter Waldo, based on the dubious authority of their French Bible translations. Such criticisms, made by a spiritual subject to a spiritual superior, flout the proper order that needs to pertain in the Church:

Cum enim iuxta verbum apostoli servus suo domino stet aut cadat (Rom. 14:4), profecto ab episcopo cuius est correctioni subiectus debet in mansuetudinis spiritu castigari, non autem a populo cuius est correctioni praepositus in spiritu superbiae reprehendi.… Nec quisquam suae praesumptionis audaciam illo defendat exemplo quod asina legitur reprehendisse prophetam.… Cum aliud sit fratrem in se peccantem occulte corripere, quod utique quisque tenetur efficere secundum regulam evangelicam (Matt. 18:15–17), in quo casu sane potest intelligi quod Balaam fuit correptus ab asina; et aliud est patrem suum etiam delinquentem reprehendere manifeste.

(Since a servant stands or falls by his own lord, according to the apostle’s word, a priest may certainly be chastised in a spirit of gentleness by the bishop to whose correction he is subject, but not reprehended in a spirit of pride by the people for whose correction he is himself responsible. Nor may anyone justify the boldness of their own presumption by means of the story in which the ass is described as having reproved the prophet. It is one thing to correct a sinning brother privately, which anyone at all is obliged to do according to the evangelical rule, as was the manner in which it can reasonably be understood that Balaam was corrected by the ass; it is a different matter to reprove one’s father openly, even if he is doing wrong.)

Even private correction of priests by laypeople, following the process that Christ lays out in the Gospels, can be carried out only in situations in which a priest, having confessed his innocence, willingly hears the complaints of subordinates (sponte sua confisus innocentia se subditorum accusationi supponit). Innocent’s investment in the principle of hierarchy produces a severely restricted interpretation