Books by Nicholas Watson

Balaam's Ass attempts the first comprehensive overview of religious writing in early England's vernacular languages-Old English, Insular French, and Middle English-between the ninth and sixteenth centuries. In this first of three volumes, Watson focuses on the first generation of these writings, in Old English and early Middle English.

These essays offer new vistas on the idea of the vernacular in contexts as diverse as Ramon Llull's prefiguration of universal grammar, the orthography of Early Middle English, the struggle for linguistic purity in Early Modern Dutch, and the construction of standard Serbian and Romanian in the waning decades of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

This 1991 book is a literary study of Richard Rolle, one of the most widely read English writers of the late Middle Ages. Nicholas Watson proposes a chronology of Rolle's Latin and English writings and offers a literary analyses of a number of his works, showing how they focus principally on the establishment of his own spiritual authority.