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The Song of Songs in the History of Sexuality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Stephen D. Moore
Stephen D. Moore
Affiliation:
Stephen D. Moore is associate professor of New Testament at the Theological School, Drew University.
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Extract

The arduous task of queering the Song of Songs, a book that is ostensibly an unequivocal celebration of male-female sexual love, was accomplished over many centuries by the Fathers and Doctors of the Church (as well as by Jewish Sages of blessed memory, though they were hampered by a modesty and restraint to which their Christian cousins were seldom subject). Night after night in their cells, by flickering candlelight, they queeried the Song of Solomon, strenuously inquiring after its spiritual meaning and confidently setting it forth. And as they did so their austere cells were transformed into lavish theaters. What follows is a series of preliminary portraits of some of the more remarkable performers.

Type
Biblical Interpretation and the Construction of Christian Sexualities
Information
Church History , Volume 69 , Issue 2 , June 2000 , pp. 328 - 349
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2000

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References

This project has benefited from the encouragement and advice of various friends and colleagues, notably Fiona Black, Virginia Burrus, and Cheryl Exum. The critical input of Elizabeth Clark, Carrie Schroeder, and an anonymous reviewer for Church History is also gratefully acknowledged. All remaining errors and excesses are, of course, my own.

1. “Queering” is what “queer theory” is said to do. Familiarity with queer theory is not necessary in order to follow the argument of this article, though a note on queer theory is probably in order. The term designates a huge and heterogeneous body of work on sex and sexuality that emerged from the field(s) of literary studies during the 1990s. This work tends overwhelmingly to be social constructionist in thrust, arguing (or simply assuming) that neither heterosexuality nor homosexuality are transhistorical essences, but are historical formations of relatively recent vintage instead. Foucault's, MichelThe History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Hurley, Robert (New York: Random House, 1978), which argues that homosexuality was a product of late-nineteenth-century medical discourse, has been a crucial catalyst in the emergence of queer theory (most of which is not theory, however, despite the name, but rather literary and cultural criticism). Along with a deconstruction of essentialized sexuality, queer theory is also commonly associated with a deconstruction of essentialized gender.Google Scholar Queer critics tend to affirm, with Judith Butler, that gender identity is purely performative, the product of a compulsory set of social rituals and conventions, which conspire to engender retroactively the illusion that masculinity and femininity are natural and innate, merely “expressed” by the actions, gestures, and speech that in fact produce them (see especially Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Thinking Gender [New York: Routledge, 1990]). Such arguments have profound political stakes, striking as they do at the gender conformity and sexual conformity that are the twin pillars of most contemporary cultures. So long as heterosexuality, in particular, is assumed to be natural, neutral, universal, or God-given, it remains the ultimate ideological formation (“compulsory heterosexuality” or “heteronormativity,” as it is frequently labeled).Google Scholar The present article contrasts Christian interpretations of the Song of Songs before and after the “invention” of heterosexuality. Further on queer theory, see Jagose, Annamarie, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1996);Google ScholarBerlant, Lauren and Warner, Michael, “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?” PMLA 110 (1995): 343–49;Google Scholarand de Lauretis, Teresa, ed., Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities, differences 3 (1991).Google ScholarFor liaisons between queer theory and religious studies, see Cornstock, Gary David and Henking, Susan E., eds., Que(e)rying Religion: A Critical Anthology (New York: Continuum, 1997);Google ScholarBoyarin, Daniel, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man, Contra versions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society 8 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997);Google ScholarJordan, Mark D., The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology, Sexuality, History, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997);Google Scholarand especially Rambuss, Richard, Closet Devotions (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998).Google Scholar

2. Origen, Homilies on the Song of Songs 1.2–3.Google ScholarThe translation of the Homilies and the Commentary used throughout is that of Lawson, R. P., Origen, The Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies, Ancient Christian Writers: The Works of the Fathers in Translation 26 (Westminster, Md.: Newman, 1957).Google Scholar

3. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs 2.2. The translation of the Sermons used throughout is that of the Cistercian Fathers series: The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, vols. 2–5: On the Song of Songs I–IV, ed. Pennington, M. Basil, trans. Walsh, Kilian and Edmonds, Irene (Spencer, Mass.: Cistercian Publications, 1971–1980).Google ScholarAnn Matter notes the untranslatability of the Vulgate of Song 1:1, the verse that has gotten Bernard so worked up. Over the course of five words, in a paroxysm of alliteration, it contrives to repeat cognate words for “kiss” and “mouth” three times: “Osculetur me osculo oris sui.”Google ScholarHow to match this in English? Matter's tongue-in-cheek suggestion is, “Let him kiss me with the kiss of his kisser.” Matter, E. Ann, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity, Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 126.Google Scholar

4. Bernard, , Sermons on the Song of Songs 9.2.Google Scholar

5. Bernard, , Sermons on the Song of Songs 9.7.Google Scholar

6. Annotated extracts from Denis's Ennaratio in Canticum cantkorum are conveniently available in translation in Turner, Denys, Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs, Cistercian Studies 156 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1995), 411–48. More than two hundred pages of Turner's book are composed of translated and annotated extracts from medieval commentaries on the Song. Unless indicated, translations and paragraph numbering of all such commentaries in this article follow Turner.Google Scholar

7. John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle 27. The translation is from The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kavanaugh, Kieran and Rodriguez, Otilio (New York: Doubleday, 1964). Essentially the Spiritual Canticle is a free poetic paraphrase of the Song of Songs.Google Scholar

8. Under “allegorical,” here and throughout, I am subsuming three different “senses of sacred Scripture” that the medieval mind, in particular, generally took pains to distinguish, namely the allegorical, the anagogical, and the tropological (or moral). My usage of the term “literal,” too, is rough and ready by medieval standards; by the thirteenth century the term had become subject to some exquisite refinements.Google Scholar

9. By which I mean simply that in Christian allegorical exegesis of the Song through the ancient, medieval, and early modern periods, the expositor in all but a tiny handful of the extant texts is a male who addresses himself primarily to an audience of male peers, synecdochic stand-ins for the church in its entirety. The first possible exception to the rule is the anonymous twelfth-century Christian commentary on the Song known as the St. Trudperter Hohelied, and the first certain exceptions are Mechtilde of Magdeburg's thirteenth-century Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit, which includes mystical meditation on selected verses from the Song, and Teresa of Avila's sixteenth-century Conceptos del amor de Dios sobre unas palabras de los Cantares. See further Riedlinger, Helmut, Die Makellosigkeit der Kirche in den Lateinischen Hoheliedkommentaren des Mittelalters, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters 38.3 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1958), 226–33 (on the St. Trudperter Hohelied);Google ScholarMechtilde of Magdeburg, The Revelations of Mechtilde of Magdeburg, or The Flowing Light of the Godhead, ed. and trans. Menzies, Lucy (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1953);Google Scholarand Teresa of Avila, The Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus, ed. and trans. Peers, E. Allison (London: Sheed and Ward, 1946), 2: 352–99. Why so few extant meditations or commentaries on the Song by women? The surprise is rather that there are any at all. The most celebrated of the few just listed, that of Teresa, was famously reduced to ashes by the author on the orders of her confessor, alarmed that a woman should presume to pronounce on mystical matters, and it survives (in truncated form) only because another nun had earlier chanced to make a personal copy of the first seven chapters.Google Scholar

10. The poem (if indeed it is a poem and not a mini-anthology of love lyrics) contains three voices: a female voice, a male voice, and a group voice. Of the three, the female voice is the most prominent, delivering most of the lines and initiating most of the exchanges, as Phyllis Trible observed in “Love's Lyrics Redeemed,” in her God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, Overtures to Biblical Theology 2 (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978), 144–65.Google Scholar Trible is only one of a number of feminist critics who have been drawn to the Song on that account; others include Athalya Brenner, Marcia Falk, Julia Kristeva, Carol Meyers, and Renita Weems. For a catena of relevant quotations from these critics, see Exum, J. Cheryl, “Developing Strategies of Feminist Criticism/Developing Strategies for Commentating the Song of Songs,” in Clines, David J. A. and Moore, Stephen D., eds., Auguries: The Jubilee Volume of the Sheffield Department of Biblical Studies, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement 269 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 227.Google Scholar The more the Song is presumed to be a unified composition (as opposed to a mere compilation), the more its female protagonist emerges as a coherently delineated character. The presumption of unity was, of course, generally shared by precritical exegetes of the Song, and must have facilitated their imaginative appropriation (and obliteration!) of the protagonist's voice. The prominence of this female voice has also prompted some modern commentators to suggest that the Song was the work of a woman; see most recently LaCocque, André, Romance, She Wrote: A Hermeneutical Essay on Song of Songs (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1998).Google Scholar

11. Listen again to Origen, for example: “HIS LEFT HAND IS UNDER MY HEAD, AND HIS RIGHT HAND SHALL EMBRACE ME (Song 2:6). The picture before us in this drama of love is that of the Bride hastening to consummate her union with the Bridegroom. But turn with all speed to the life-giving Spirit and, eschewing physical terms, consider carefully what is the left hand of the Word of God, what the right; also what His Bride's head is—the head, that is to say, of the perfect soul or of the Church; and do not suffer an interpretation that has to do with the flesh and the passions to carry you away” (Commentary on the Song of Songs 3.9). Subsequent allegorists of the Song similarly whisk us away like nervous nannies every time the bride and groom look like they are about to engage in a clinch—though with the passage of time allegorical expositors also developed more subtle strategies for sanitizing the salacious Song.Google ScholarAnne W. Astell notes that “Unlike Origen, whose belief in two loves—carnal and spiritual, demonic and divine—led him to disassociate the literal and allegorical meanings of the Song, twelfth century exegetes upheld a unitary concept of love. They therefore approached the erotic images of the Song in a way that rendered them transparent to their divine tenor, sacramentalizing them, making them vehicles for an organic transference of the affectus to Christ the Bridegroom” (The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press], 178).Google Scholar

12. Examples drawn from Nicholas of Lyra, The Postilla Litteralis on the Song of Songs 62–63.Google Scholar For a continuous 382-page catena of ancient and medieval interpretations of the Song, lavishly studded with such gems (but all presented with a solemnity that is positively unnerving in its intensity), see Littledale, Richard Frederick, A Commentary on the Song of Songs from Ancient and Mediaeval Sources (London: Joseph Masters and Son, 1869).Google Scholar

13. Denis the Carthusian, Enarratio in Canticum Canticorum 42.Google Scholar

14. Shulamit(h), or the Shulam(m)ite, is the name traditionally given to the female protagonist of the Song (cf. 6:13).Google Scholar

15. Origen, Homilies on the Song of Songs 1.1.Google Scholar

16. Origen, Homilies on the Song of Songs 1.8.Google Scholar

17. Though the first Christian known to have allegorized the Song was Hippolytus of Rome, fragments of whose commentary on it (ca. 200?) survive.Google Scholar

18. See Urbach, Ephraim E., “The Homiletical Interpretation of the Sages and the Expositions of Origen on Canticles, and the Jewish-Christian Disputation,” Scripta hierosolymitana 22 (1971): 248–75;Google ScholarKimelman, Reuven, “Rabbi Yohanan and Origen on the Song of Songs,” Harvard Theological Review 73 (1980): 567–95.Google Scholar

19. Eusebius, , Ecclesiastical History 6.8.1–3.Google ScholarScholars have long been divided over the credibility of Eusebius's testimony, ranging from Henry Chadwick's outright dismissal of it as “malicious gossip” (Chadwick, , The Sentences of Sextus, Texts and Studies 5 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959], 68; cf. 9–12;CrossRefGoogle Scholaridem, Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966], 67),Google Scholarto Patricia Cox's more cautious dismissal (Biography in Late Antiquity: A Quest for the Holy Man [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983], 88–90),Google Scholarand the relative confidence of others in its Veracity (see for instance Hanson, R., “A Note on Origen's Self-Mutilation,” Vigiliae christianae 20 [1966]: 81–82;CrossRefGoogle ScholarTrigg, Wilson, Origen: The Bible and Philosophy in the Third-Century Church [Atlanta: John Knox, 1983], 54;Google Scholarand Caner, Daniel F., “The Practice and Prohibition of Self-Castration in Early Christianity,” Vigiliae christianae 51 [1997]: 401). I shall not rehearse the arguments pro and con, as I have nothing substantive to add to them, though it does seem to me that the skeptics have the less convincing case. But even if I were persuaded otherwise, I would be unable to avoid the suspicion that Eusebius is here instinctively acknowledging the intrinsic queerness of Origen's spirituality by assigning him a physical body to match his literary corpus.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20. Boyarin succinctly defines the phallus as “a platonic idea of the penis,” Unheroic Conduct, 9. The phrase “twenty thousand lines” comes from Jerome's prologue to his Latin translation of the Homilies.Google Scholar

21. Brown, Peter, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 169. Brown, too, takes Eusebius at his word. The notion of eunuchhood as exile is from Claudius Mamertinus, Panegyrici latini 11.19.4.Google Scholar

22. Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs, prologue, 4.Google Scholar

23. The Bridegroom owes his hermaphroditic cleavage to the LXX and Vulgate translations of Song 1:2, which read mastoi sou and ubera tua respectively (“your breasts”), whereas the Masoretic text has dodeka (“your love”). “The basis for this rendering is somewhat obscure,” as G. Lloyd Carr observes, “but both the Hebrew word “loves” (dôdîm) and the Hebrew word “breasts” (dadayîm) would be written simply as ddm in the old consonantal text”;Google ScholarThe Song of Solomon: An Introduction and Commentary, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1984), 73.Google Scholar

24. Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs 1.2.Google Scholar

25. Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs 1.4.Google Scholar

26. Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs 1.2.Google Scholar

27. Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs 3.15.Google Scholar

28. Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs, prologue, 4.Google Scholar

29. Boyarin, , Unheroic Conduct, 26.Google Scholar

30. Garber, Marjorie, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 16–17, her emphasis.Google Scholar

31. Garber herself in her chapter on “Religious Habits” writes of the perceived femininity of the priest or monk in medieval society: “beardless, wearing a cassock that could be thought to resemble a woman's skirt, devoid of political power, living in quiet obedience, and performing domestic chores”; Vested Interests, 218. The chapter carries a telling epigraph from Sydney Smith's 1855 novel, Lady Holland's Memoir: “As the French say, there are three sexes—men, women, and clergymen.”Google Scholar

32. And thus overtaking Origen, whose three extant books on the Song carry him all the way to 2:15. Bernard began the sermons in 1135 and continued them until his death in 1153. On Bernard's relationship to Origen, who was still a controversial figure in the twelfth century, see Evans, G. R., The Mind of St. Bernard of Clairvaux (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 82–85.Google Scholar

33. William of St. Thierry et al., St. Bernard of Clairvaux: The Story of His Life as Recorded in the “Vita Prima Bernardi” by Certain of His Contemporaries, William of St. Thierry, Arnold of Bonnevaux, Geoffry and Philip of Clairvaux, and Odo of Deuil, trans. Webb, Geoffrey and Walker, Adrian (London: A.R. Mowbray and Co., 1960). William began the biography around 1147 and covered the first forty years of Bernard's life. After William's death, Arnold of Bonnevaux took up the tale.Google Scholar

34. Not that all commentators on the Song were celibate. Gregory of Nyssa, for example, seems to have been married.Google Scholar

35. Cf. Butler, Gender Trouble, 137: “The performance of drag plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being performed.”Google Scholar

36. Though Bernard represents himself throughout as an abbot addressing his monks, authorities on the sermons tend to take the view that they were not actually delivered to live audiences. Rather they were dictated to a secretary originally and incessantly revised by Bernard throughout his latter years. See Leclercq, Jean, “The Making of a Masterpiece,” trans. Waters, Kathleen, in Pennington, On the Song of SongsIV, ix–xxiv.Google Scholar

37. Rupert of Deutz's Commentaria in Canticum Canticorum (de Incarnatione Domini) (ca. 1125) seems to have been a crucial catalyst in this development, though Rupert was anticipated by Ambrose, Epiphanius, and others. The liturgy may have been a more general catalyst. Denys Turner, following J.-M. Salgado, suggests that the mariological interpretation of the Song was encouraged by the practice, documented as early as the eighth century, of including readings of the Song in the offices of the feast of the Assumption and, later on, the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin (though of course this practice also presupposes the mariological interpretation). See Turner, , Eros and Allegory, 306 n. 1;Google ScholarSalgado, J.-M., “Les Considerations Mariales de Rupert de Deutz dans ses Commentaria in Canticum Canticorum,” Divinitas 32–33 (1988): 692–709.Google Scholar

38. Alan of Lille, In Cantica Canticorum 2–4.Google Scholar

39. Alan of Lille, In Cantica Canticorum 8.Google Scholar

40. Denis the Carthusian, Enarratio in Canticum canticorum 55, 58. Denis's was the first commentary to treat each verse of the Song with reference to the church, the soul, and the Blessed Virgin in turn, a system adopted by a number of subsequent expositors.Google Scholar

41. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs 3.5.Google Scholar

42. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs 8.1–2, 6.Google Scholar

43. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs 8.7.Google Scholar

44. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs 8.7.Google Scholar

45. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs 8.8.Google Scholar

46. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs 3.5.Google Scholar

47. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs 8.9.Google Scholar

48. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, trans. Iswolsky, Hélène (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984; Russian original 1965).Google Scholar

49. Bakhtin, , Rabelais and His World, 5.Google Scholar

50. Bakhtin, , Rabelais and His World, 9.Google Scholar

51. Bakhtin, , Rabelais and His World, 10.Google Scholar

52. Bakhtin, , Rabelais and His World, 13. An early example of the ecclesiastical carnivalesque was Coena Cypriani, a brazen travesty of the entire Bible. Later came the parodia sacra, a cluster of parodical liturgies, litanies, hymns, psalms, prayers (not excluding the Pater Noster and the Ave Maria), gospel stories, and even dominical sayings. “All of it was consecrated by tradition and, to a certain extent, tolerated by the Church. It was created and preserved under the auspices of the ‘Paschal laughter’ or of the ‘Christmas laughter’; it was in part directly linked, as in the parodies of liturgies and prayers, with the ‘feast of fools’ and may have been performed during this celebration” (Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 14).Google Scholar

53. Bakhtin, , Rabelais and His World, 9.Google Scholar

54. With no wedding veil in sight and no apparent interest in procreation. Yet everywhere they looked in the Song, the theocratic elite saw their own authority affirmed and celebrated—as even casual perusal of the vast welter of material assembled in Littledale, The Song of Songs from Ancient and Mediaeval Sources, reveals, so much of it taking the form of statements such as the following: “the breasts [of the Bride] are the Doctors of the Church, who supply spiritual nourishment to her children” (173).Google Scholar

55. Bakhtin, , Rabelais and His World, 9.Google Scholar

56. Though it is often assumed that Theodore produced a commentary on the Song, there is actually no evidence that he did. The Acts of the Council of Constantinople quote an extract from a personal letter of Theodore to a friend, which indicates that he declined to assign any allegorical significance to the Song, regarding it instead as love poetry written by Solomon in defense of his decision to marry an Egyptian princess. There are no extant fragments of an actual commentary by Theodore on the Song, however, nor do the catalogues of his titles list any such work.Google Scholar

57. See Pope, Marvin H., Song of Songs: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible 7c (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977), 119–20, for details.Google Scholar

58. Though not from popular readings, as would appear from numerous indications in the commentaries. Denis the Carthusian, for example, his cheeks flushed with indignation, quotes the Chancellor of Paris, “the most learned master John Gerson,” himself the author of a commentary on the Song, as follows: “No one should be distracted from belief in the most hidden and pure senses which the smokescreen of the literal [sense] disguises in carnality, nor should a person hit the rock of scandal of a foul sensuality. It would be shameful to repeat what I have heard for myself: it would offend pious ears” (Enarratio in Canticum canticorum 16). “Oh, do tell!” the prurient reader can hardly help exclaiming. Chaucer, in contrast, is happy to tell. In “The Merchant's Tale” he has the lecher Januarie propose a resolutely carnal reading of the Song; see The Canterbury Tales, ed. Robinson, F. N. (2nd ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), lines 2132–49).Google ScholarPopular profanations of the Song were not unknown among Jews either. B. Sanhedrin 12.10 attributes a stern warning to Rabbi Aqiba: “Whoever sings the Song of Songs with tremulous voice in a banquet hall and (so) treats it as a sort of ditty has no share in the world to come” (cf. b. Sanhedrin 101a).Google Scholar

59. von Herder's, J. G.Salomon's Lieder der Liebe, die ältesten und schönsten aus den Morgenlande (Leipzig, 1778) is often seen as pivotal in this regard, though several isolated voices arguing for a thoroughgoing literal interpretation of the Song preceded Herder's,Google Scholarsuch as Castellio[n], Sebastian, Notae in Canticum Canticorum in Biblia latina (Geneva, 1547),Google ScholarGrotius, Hugo, Ad Canticum Canticorum (1644), Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, Libri Salomonis, Canticum Canticorum (Paris, 1693), and William Whiston, A Supplement to Mr. Whiston's Late Essay, towards Restoring the True Text of the Old Testament, Proving That the Canticles Is Not a Sacred Book of the Old Testament;Google ScholarNor Was Originally Esteemed As Such Either by the Jewish Or the Christian Church (London, 1723).Google ScholarMartin Luther stands on the fringes of this group; in his Vorlesung über des Hohelied (1530–31; Eng. trans. Siggins, Ian, in Luther's Works 15 [St. Louis: Concordia, 1972], 189–264) he expressed dissatisfaction with the allegorical tradition but hesitated to go all the way with the literal interpretation.Google Scholar

60. In scholarly circles, just as literal readers of the Song were voices crying in the wilderness in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, allegorical readers have been the isolated voices in the twentieth century. They have included Joüon, Paul, Le Cantique des Cantiques: Commentaire philologique el exégétique (Paris: Beauchesne, 1909);Google ScholarRobert, André, Tournay, Raymond, and Feuillet, André, Le Cantique des Cantiques: Traduction et commentaire, Études bibliques (Paris: Gabalda, 1963);Google Scholarand Stadelmann, Luis, Love and Politics: A New Commentary on the Song of Songs (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist, 1992). Yet these twentiethcentury allegorists tend to be worlds apart from Bernard of Clairvaux or Saint John of the Cross. All three of the above, for example, interpret the Song as an allegory of Israelite history—a far more restrained affair than its interpretation as an allegory of the soul's conjugal union with Christ.Google Scholar

61. Delitzsch, Franz, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, trans. Easton, M. G. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1980), 5.Google Scholar The interpretation of the Song as a series of ancient Hebrew wedding songs also made its appearance in the late nineteenth century—in J. G. Wetzstein's appendix to Delitzsch's commentary, for example (162–76), but particularly in the work of Karl Budde: “Was is das Hohelied?” Preussische Jahrbücher 78 (1894): 92–117;Google Scholar“Das Hohelied erklärt,” in Budde, Karl, Bertholet, Alfred, and Wildeboer, D. G., Die fünf Megillot, Kurzer Hand-Commentar zum Alten Testament 6 (Freiburg, Leipzig, and Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1898), 9–48.Google Scholar

62. Passing through Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics, for example, and finding expression in the most recent large-scale commentary on the Song, that of Roland E. Murphy. See Barth, , Church Dogmatics, vol. 3, The Doctrine of Creation, ed. Bromiley, Geoffrey W. and Torrance, Thomas F. (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1958–1961), 1: 288–329, 2: 291–324, and 4: 116–240;Google ScholarMurphy, , The Song of Songs: A Commentary on the Book of Canticles or The Song of Songs, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), 100.Google ScholarNumerous other examples may be found in Pope, Song of Songs, 192–205, a survey of the “notable trend” of interpreting the Song as “human love poetry” (192).Google Scholar

63. The term first appears in a letter from Karl Maria Kertbeny to fellow sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. The passage from terminus technicus to ubiquitous ideology, however, was a protracted one. Its progress is painstakingly traced in Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (New York: Penguin Books, 1995).Google Scholar For a useful companion to Katz, see Richardson, Diane, ed., Theorising Heterosexuality: Telling It Straight (Buckingham, U.K.: Open University Press, 1996).Google Scholar

64. See Pope, 193–205 passim; Murphy, The Song of Songs, 40–41.Google Scholar

65. To the best of my knowledge, J. Cheryl Exum was the first woman ever to publish a scholarly article on the Song: “A Literary and Structural Analysis of the Song of Songs,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 85 (1973): 47–79. By now there are many women writing on the Song—but few of them could be classed as conservative.Google Scholar