The Song of Songs and the Fashioning of Identity in Early Latin Christianity by Karl Shuve, and: Out of the Cloister: Scholastic Exegesis of the Song of Songs, 1100–1250 by Suzanne LaVere (review)

The central role of the Song of Songs in the history of Christian spirituality and mysticism is well known. The history of allegorical interpretation (Bernard McGinn referred to it as "the traditional reading") has been the subject of much scholarly attention over the last century. Biblical commentators feel compelled to include some kind of survey of this history before turning to their attention to the text itself. The homilies and commentaries of Origen and Bernard of Clairvaux have been the subject of countless studies through the years. More recently Gregory of Nyssa's work on the Song has gained the attention of theologians. E. Ann Matter, Ann Astell, Denys Turner and others have produced widely read surveys of the Song's role in ancient and medieval Christian spirituality, and Bernard McGinn's ongoing multi-volume history of Christian mysticism provides excellent analyses of how many of the individual figures included in his work treated the Song. In recent decades, many feminist and queer Biblical scholars have turned to pre-critical and mystical readings of the Song as, perhaps, offering insights that might produce generative and liberating readings of the text in a post-modern era. In other words, the ancient and medieval commentary traditions—especially from the West—have been fertile fields of study for understanding Christian biblical interpretation, Christian mysticism, monastic spirituality and exegesis, and the role of the erotic in Christian spirituality. One might wonder, given the vast amount of scholarship on this subject, whether this well plowed ground can yield any more harvest.

The two books under review here demonstrate that this tradition remains a fertile field. While Karl Shuve and Suzanne LaVere address a commentary tradition that has been well studied, each author challenges some conventional wisdom established in past scholarship regarding the allegorical reception of the Song of Songs in Christian spirituality, and each offers provocative new readings of the material they address.

Shuve offers a fresh account of the prominence of the Song of Songs in medieval Christian spirituality by focusing on how ancient Latin writers treated the Song. This approach challenges the widely assumed predominance of Origen's influence on the trajectory of interpretation. Questioning what he characterizes as a reduction of Western Song of Songs interpretation to "a history of the transmission of Origen's thought" (2), Shuve does not deny the great Alexandrian exegete's influence. However, he argues that there were other influences as well, and that many early Latin treatments of the Song did not appropriate the affective / mystical framework that sees the Song as an expression of the passionate love between Christ and the soul that has become the prevailing perception of its history. Instead, they used the Song to establish Christian identity, marking the boundaries of the church in one interpretive thread, and marking the boundaries of the ascetic body in another.

One of Shuve's valuable insights is that Song reception scholarship has too often limited itself to formal commentaries on the Song. Since there are few extant commentaries from the period in question here (the third and fourth centuries), this approach obscures a prominent strain of Song interpretation that was transmitted through numerous citations and allusions in other types of literature: letters, polemical treatises, catechetical works, instructions about liturgy and the sacraments, etc. The authors Shuve treats include Cyprian of Carthage, Ambrose, Augustine, Tyconius, Gregory of Elvira, and Jerome. None of these authors figure prominently—if at all—in the standard roll calls of Song of Songs interpretation history. This approach is significant and welcome in that it makes room for a fuller account of the role of the Song in the history of Christian spirituality, theology...