Conceptions of the Word: The Mother Tongue and the Incarnation of God

Abstract

Abstract This paper is one in a series written to lay the groundwork for a book which has the working title ‘Balaam’s Ass: Vernacular Theology in Medieval England’. In particular, it forms half of a diptych of papers whose joint theme is the theological meanings of the vernacular; the other is ‘Visions of lnclusion: Universal Salvation in Pre Reformation England’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27 (1997), 145-87. Other papers whose concerns overlap with this one are The English Mystics’, in David Wallace (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature: Writing in Britain, Io66-I547 (Cambridge, forthcoming); and ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409’, Speculum, 70 (1995), 822-64. Early versions of parts of the paper were read at ‘The Cultural Work of Ritual, Symbol, and the Other’, University of Western Ontario (London, Ontario, Canada) in February 1995; at ‘Women in the Christian Tradition’, European Science Foundation Conference (Strasbourg, France), October 1995; and to the medieval seminar at Berkeley, California, in March 1996.