[In the following essay, Matter explores medieval Christian interpretations of the Song of Songs which associate the figure of the Bride with the Virgin Mary.]

The female gender of one of the voices of the Song of Songs, so much more obvious in Latin than in English, elicited little comment from the medieval exegetes who worked in the allegorical and tropological modes. Of course, as both Ecclesia and anima are feminine nouns in Latin, there was no linguistic difficulty in putting the words of the Bride in the mouth of the Church or of the human soul. But a logical consequence of medieval fascination with the Song of Songs was an association of the Bride with a human, a woman, although a highly idealized figure, the Virgin Mary. This form of personification begins early in the Latin liturgical tradition, and gradually becomes a part of Song of Songs commentary. In the history of western Christian interpretation, use of the Song of Songs in praise of the Virgin is a precursor, and to some extent a determinant, of a tradition of exegesis in the mariological mode. The confluence of marian liturgies and mariological Song of Songs exegesis is another interesting example of both the continual inner transformation and the outward expansion of the commentary genre.

THE SONG OF SONGS IN LITURGIES OF THE VIRGIN

Veneration of the Virgin Mary in western Christianity is closely linked to theological speculation about the humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ. The paradox of divine incarnation is, of course, a central tenet of Christian doctrine. Periods of high christology, especially those linked to eucharistic formulations, tended to be accompanied by liturgies in honor of the Virgin Mary. Three events in the Virgin's life became the focus of major devotions: her special nativity, her bodily assumption into heaven (both testified to by extra-canonical Christian writings), and her ritual purification according to Jewish law after the birth of Jesus (testified to by the Gospel of Luke). Liturgies for the feasts of the Nativity, Assumption, and Purification of the Virgin Mary had developed uses of the Song of Songs by the seventh century. These references to the Song of Songs became especially prominent, and received elaborate comment tending toward commentary, in the theologically expansive Carolingian Church. The Assumption of the Virgin Mary was the feast which especially brought about a transformation of the liturgical use of the Song of Songs to a marian level of interpreting the text.

Perhaps because of a desire to link liturgical practice to the formative figures of Latin Christianity, two of the most influential Carolingian treatises about the Virgin Mary are pseudonymous, bearing attributions to Augustine and Jerome. Jaroslav Pelikan has pointed out that when tracing theological elements of the early Middle Ages, it is often "more difficult than current conventional wisdom among theologians suggests to tell the difference between the 'pious fraud' of pseudonymity and just plain forgery." In any case, and however they may be judged by modern readers, the anonymous homily De Assumptione Beatae Mariae Virginis, which circulated as a work of Augustine, and the pseudonymous work of Paschasius Radbertus known as Cogitis me ("You Compel Me"), which was transmitted as Epistle 9 of Jerome, were far more widely read than anything either Jerome or Augustine actually wrote about the Virgin Mary. This fact has a certain irony which is compounded by the probability that Augustine would have disapproved of the unapologetic use of the Song of Songs as a canonical reference to the Assumption of the Virgin.

Cogitis me is probably the earlier treatise, and it certainly makes the more important connection between the Song of Songs and the Feast of the Assumption. It is by far the most popular of a number of mariological works written by the ninth-century monk and sometimes abbot of Corbie, Paschasius Radbertus. The text opens with a conscious literary conceit, claiming that it is a letter of Jerome to his friends Paula and Eustochium, nuns in Bethlehem, when it actually was written by Radbertus for his friends and childhood protectors, Theodrada and Irma, nuns of Soissons. Like Jerome's friends, Theodrada and Irma were a mother-daughter pair dedicated to the life of Christian contemplation. Their relationship to Radbertus was extremely close, since Radbertus had been left as a foundling at the monastery, a house dedicated to the Virgin Mary, where Theodrada (a cousin of Charlemagne) was abbess. He received monastic tonsure at this house before moving to Corbie, where Theodrada's brothers, Adalard and Wala, were abbots in the first third of the ninth century.

Posing as a famous figure from biblical or even classical antiquity was a common enough practice among Carolingian literary figures, especially those, like Radbertus, who had some contact with the ways of the court. But the pseudepigrahical attribution of Cogitis me to Jerome had more serious consequences than those, for example, of Charlemagne posing as David or Alcuin playing Horace, for the text passed enthusiastically through the Middle Ages with only one ripple of dissent when Hincmar, Bishop of Reims, had a luxury copy written for his cathedral chapter shortly after the death of Radbertus. To medieval eyes, Cogitis me was received as Jerome's elegant testimony to the Feast of the Assumption.

Cogitis me is, moreover, an exemplary document for discerning the influence of particular liturgies on Carolingian theology, end on the changing genre of Song of Songs interpretation. This is particularly so because Radbertus's text stays quite close to one important liturgical source, the Antiphoner of Compiegne, a manuscript from the monastery of Saint-Corneille associated by tradition with Charles the Bald. Quotations from the Song of Songs in the Cogitis me can usually also be found in this liturgical tradition, in a series of antiphons and responses to the Common of Virgins, to the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, and, especially, to the Assumption. These liturgical uses brought with them the earliest associations of the Song of Songs with the Virgin Mary, a devotional tradition with roots at least as far back as Ambrose.

The liturgy has always provided an arena for the ritual adaptation of sacred texts. In the monastic tradition, the liturgy was not limited to the Mass, but included the continual round of monastic offices, each of which drew antiphonary material from the Bible. This daily liturgical discipline provided a social and intellectual context in which adaptation of the Song of Songs for marian feasts flourished. A striking example of this process can be seen in a composite version of Song of Songs 6:9 and 6:3 which in the Antiphoner of Compiègne appears as an antiphon for the Vespers of the Feast of the Assumption of Mary:

quae est ista quae ascendit
  quasi aurora consurgens
pulchra ut luna electa ut sol
  terribilis ut castrorum acies ordinata

Who is this who ascends
 like the rising dawn
beautiful as the moon, chosen as the sun

terrible as a battle line drawn up from the camps?

This is not a known Vetus Latina text. In fact, it is extremely close to the Vulgate texts from which it is drawn, varying in only one small but important word: "ascendit" for "progreditur." The change from "goes forth" to "ascends" emphasizes the connection of the verses to the Feast of the Assumption. Radbertus must have been quite familiar with this liturgy, for he quotes this peculiar, "marianized" composite both in the deliberately pseudepigraphical Cogitis me and in the first of his Assumption sermons, a text which is accidentally pseudepigraphical, having been incorporated into the series of sermons attributed to Ildefonsus of Toledo. Other quotations from the Song of Songs in Cogitis me also show the influence of the liturgical tradition of the Antiphoner of Compiegne by particular combinations of verses, or minor textual variants. Scrutiny of these passages suggests how the liturgical tradition led Radbertus to speak of the Virgin Mary as the Bride of the Song of Songs; but the theological use which Radbertus found for Song of Songs texts in his treatises on the Virgin marks the beginning of a new mode of exegesis.

The complexity of this movement from liturgical use to a mode of exegesis is evident in the way Radbertus quotes a crucial passage for marian exegesis of the Song of Songs 4:12b-13:

Whence it is sung about her in those same Canticles: "A garden enclosed, a fountain sealed, your shoots a paradise." Truly a garden of delights, in which are planted all kinds of flowers, and the good scents of virtues; and so enclosed that it cannot be violated or corrupted by any trick of deceit. Therefore, a fountain sealed with the seal of the whole Trinity, out of which flows the fountain of life, "in whose light we all see light," (Psalm 35:10, Vulgate) since according to John, "He is the one who sheds light on every man coming into this world." (John 1:9). In the shoot springing forth from her womb is the paradise of the heavenly citizen.

In this passage, Mary and Jesus are described by pastoral images of the Song of Songs which become metaphors of salvation: she is a garden, a fountain, out of which springs Christ, the Logos, the paradise of the blessed. Although the imagery is highly laudatory of the Virgin Mary, it nevertheless makes clear that her major virtue lies in being the spotless source of the incarnate God. The function of the Song of Songs here resonates clearly with the commentary genre as it had developed to the ninth century. The tropological or moral understanding of the Song of Songs greatly informs this treatise, in the sense that the Virgin becomes a spiritual model offered to the religious women for whom the treatise was written, perhaps in a conscious echo of Jerome's Epistle 22 to Eustochium.

Cassian's allegorical mode is also evident here, mediated through an understanding of Mary as the Church, the "garden enclosed" of many earlier Latin commentaries on the Song of Songs. This subtle mixture of allegory in the service of theology, an approach which could be properly called "mariological" as well as "marian," is the spirit in which Radbertus quotes the "hortus conclusus" passage here. The same attitude is also found in Radbertus's defense of the virginity of Mary in partu, and in his commentary on the epithalamial Vulgate Psalm 44, "My heart proffers a good word."

Although Radbertus had set the stage for a mariological reading of the Song of Songs, it was not until the twelfth century that this mode of exposition was fully realized. Liturgies of the Virgin Mary are also very close to the first systematic mariological exposition of the Song of Songs, the Sigillum Beatae Mariae of Honorius Augustodunensis. In fact, the liturgy can be said to have sparked this text, since the Sigillum begins with a demand "discipuli ad magistrum" why Luke 10:38 (the story of Mary and Martha) and the Song of Songs are read in the Assumption liturgy "about holy Mary, since in no way do they appear clearly to pertain to her." The Sigillum is made up of short commentaries on this Gospel and the Epistle of the Assumption, followed by a complete, line-by-line, exposition of the antiphonal text for the feast, the Song of Songs, understood as depicting the love between God and the Virgin Mary.

Valerie Flint has suggested that the Sigillum was written early in Honorius's career, perhaps about 1100, in England, perhaps Worcester. It is a composite work, woven together from a number of sources. The first section, on the Gospel, is a reworking of a homily attributed to Anselm, actually written by Ralph d'Escures, abbot of Saint-Martin of Seez in Normandy. The Ecclesiastes interpretation is adapted from another pseudo-Anselmian sermon, changing the reference from Christ and the Church to the Virgin Mary. This change of reference also characterizes the major part of the treatise, the mariological commentary on the Song of Songs, an interpretation of some ingenuity and great complexity of sources.

Honorius begins this exposition of the Song of Songs with an analogy between Mary and the Church which works on several levels:

The glorious Virgin Mary manifests the type of the Church, which is shown to be both virgin and mother. Indeed, she [the Church] is proclaimed mother since she is fecundated by the Holy Spirit; through her every day children of God are born in baptism. She is, moreover, called virgin because, inviolably serving the integrity of faith, she is not corrupted by heretical perverseness. So Mary was a mother bringing forth Christ, remaining a virgin after the parturition. Therefore all things which are written about the Church may be sufficiently appropriately read even about her [Mary]. Thus it says: "Let him kiss me from the kiss of his mouth." This very one whom kings and prophets were not worthy to see or hear, the Virgin was not only worthy to carry in her womb, but even, when born, to frequently give him kisses, receiving many from his sacred mouth. "For your breasts are better than wine." He who pastures the angels in the bosom of the Father, here sucks at the breast of the virgin mother.

The allegorical fluidity of this passage is remarkable. Subject and object, signified and signifier, slip back and forth even as the mode of interpretation shifts in mid-sentence. As far as the Song of Songs is concerned, Honorius seems to presume that the allegorical interpretation includes the mariological, since "all things which are written about the Church may be sufficiently appropriately (satis congrue) read even about her," that is, Mary. There is also a hint of the kiss of mystical union, several decades before Bernard of Clairvaux's third sermon on the Song of Songs, in the rapture with which the Virgin's kisses on the mouth of Christ are described. Finally, an apocalyptic vision of Christ, the shepherd of the angelic flock in the bosom of the Father, is seen in the child nursing at the breast of the virgin mother. As we have seen, these modes of understanding appear in a more highly developed form in Honorius's long Song of Songs commentary, but they are already present in this text from the beginning of his career, adapted to the Virgin Mary.

The Sigillum is thus important evidence of the transition from marian use to mariological interpretation of the Song of Songs. Indeed, this is a biblical, rather than a liturgical, commentary. The text of the Song of Songs is the Vulgate (including "progreditur" instead of "ascendit" at 6:9), and the exposition proceeds from verse to verse, each chapter expounding one chapter of the Song of Songs. Yet the Sigillum is related to what seems to be a homiletical tradition, perhaps falling between the activities of the choir and the chapter, and testifying to a tradition of spoken reflection on the Song of Songs on feasts of the Virgin.

The homiletical tone of this explanation is evident also in a series of rubrics which begin near the end of the second chapter of the Sigillum. The rubrics identify changes of voice in the text, while suggesting a line of interpretation: "The prayer of the Virgin for converts," "The praise of the Son for the Mother," "The praise of the Father for the Virgin," "The words of the Virgin hoping for Christ to come into her," "On the solicitude of the Virgin for the Church of the Jews." This last rubric is one of several which speak of the intercession of the Virgin Mary for the conversion of the Jews. In general, these titles stress the intercessory powers of the Virgin, and suggest a devotional context in which the miracles of the Virgin were a part of a growing cult.

The Sigillum Beatae Mariae bears witness to a type of devotion to the Virgin that flourished especially among the Benedictines of Western England. Honorius tells five miracles of the Virgin in this text, four of them (the Jewish boy, Theophilus, Mary the harlot, the salvific belt) near the beginning and another (the miraculous revelation to a holy hermit of the date of the Virgin's Nativity) at the end. Flint has shown that several of these miracles can be traced to the Worcester Passionale, a compilation of mariological texts which also included the Cogitis me. Not surprisingly, Honorius alludes to the Cogitis me immediately after the story of the hermit. Traces of Paschasius Radbertus are found throughout the commentary, even, perhaps, in a reference to the "hortus conclusus" of 4:12 as the virginity of Mary at the moment of the birth of Christ. The religious life looms large in the Sigillum, here again, Mary is represented as the "primum exemplum virginitatis." Her virginity is, moreover, the source of the truly miraculous birth which Christ "reserved" for himself:

God makes human beings in four ways: from the earth, as Adam; from man alone, as Eve; from man and woman, as us; from woman alone, Christ, since he reserved the privilege for himself.

The Sigillum, written at the very beginning of the twelfth century, shows equal influence of the ancient marian liturgical tradition and the growing cult of the Virgin. This century is, of course, the period in which is found the greatest increase in outright devotion to the Virgin, with both liturgical and literary responses. Even in the twelfth century, marian understanding of the Song of Songs was still linked to the liturgy; an even stronger connection was forged between the Song of Songs and the celebration of the Feast of the Assumption by the twelfth-century standardization of verses from the Song of Songs in the monastic office of the day and its octave. A number of twelfth-century sermons for the Assumption reinforce the general marian understanding of the Song of Songs while expanding on the liturgical use of one verse, as does the Sermo de Assumptione Beatae Virginis of Hugh of Saint-Victor, written for a certain Gerlandus, abbot of a monastery dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

Commentary on liturgical uses of the Song of Songs is especially interesting in its consistent application of dialogue to the text. Of course, the voices of the Song of Songs always speak either in monologue or dialogue, and we have already noted a tradition of rubrics in Latin Bibles which tended to emphasize this feature of the text. But the antiphonal nature of liturgy, where biblical verses respond to one another, creates an atmosphere of aural awareness of the Song of Songs which is lost to modern readers. When Paschasius Radbertus and Hugh of Saint-Victor wrote homilies on the Assumption, it can be said without exaggeration that they had verses from the Song of Songs ringing in their ears. Honorius's Sigillum also obviously began from a liturgical, spoken knowledge of the Song of Songs, and underlined a dialogical mood through its structure—questions and answers between students and a master. This spoken, responsory nature of the earliest marian interpretation of the Song of Songs fades as twelfth-century authors begin consciously to model their works on the commentary genre, becoming more oriented towards mariology than marian devotion. But this is a gradual process.

THE VIRGIN MARY IN SONG OF SONGS COMMENTARY

It is with the exegesis of Rupert of Deutz that mariological exposition of the Song of Songs takes the form classic to the commentary genre. Rupert was born near Liege around the year 1075, and spent much of his career in zealous support of monastic reform, especially in the Benedictine houses in the German Empire. He was certainly the paramount Latin Christian writer between Anselm of Canterbury and Bernard of Clairvaux. John Van Engen has called him "the most prolific of all twelfth century authors," and has shown that he was greatly influenced by the systematic approach to the Bible characteristic of the "masters of the Sacred Page." Rupert's exegesis is squarely and consciously in the midst of the development of theology as a school discipline. He wrote many biblical commentaries, beginning with … the Apocalypse and the Song of Songs. Rupert's second exegetical work Commentaria in Canticum Canticorum (de Incarnatione Domini) dates from around 1125. This text is extremely innovative in that it uses Cassian's modes to move the explication of the text beyond the bounds of Cassian's system.

Rupert's title proclaims his theological purpose, a reading of the Song of Songs as a love poem on the mystery of the incarnation of Christ. But here the Song is consistently understood to be in honor of the vehicle of this mysterious incarnation, the Virgin Mary. Rupert interprets the entire text of the Song of Songs with reference to the Virgin. Although abstracted from liturgical use, the commentary in some ways continues the dialogical nature of earlier marian exposition on the Song of Songs; much of it is written in the second person, addressing Mary directly, or even in the first person, allowing her to speak for herself in the words of the poems. This treatise, the shortest of Rupert's exegetical works, is much longer than the marian interpretations of the Song of Songs we have considered thus far. This is a fully developed monastic commentary heavily dependent on several treatises in the allegorical mode: the ninth-century Song of Songs catena of Angelomus of Luxeuil, the Song of Songs commentary of Gregory the Great, and also Jerome's Interpretatio hebraicorum nominum. We have already seen easy shifts of understanding of the Song of Songs from the Church to the Virgin, but none that developed the new understanding at this theological level. Rupert consistently used sources from the prevailing ecclesiological tradition of the Song of Songs to elaborate a full theology of the Virgin Mary which he found in the text.

In spite of the precedent set by treatises based on the liturgies of the Virgin, both Rupert and his contemporaries seemed very aware of the novelty of this particular interpretation as a biblical commentary, for, as Van Engen says, "it was one thing to write a treatise honoring the Blessed Virgin which drew upon selected verses of the Song hallowed by liturgical usage; it was quite another to interpret the entire Song with reference to Mary." The testimony of a letter of Rupert extant in a twelfth-century schoolbook suggests that this innovation in the Song of Songs commentary genre was actually the center of some controversy. The dispute seems to have revolved around the question of whether it was proper to assume that things understood generaliter about the Church are meant to refer specialiter to the Virgin Mary. Rupert's reply rejects the use of the scholastic terms "genus" and "species" in dealing with this question, and defends his interpretation with reference to the precedent of Cogitis me. The letter ends with the explanation that Rupert had only hoped to "add a little something" (aliquid supererogare) to the work of the Fathers, since the treasures of Scripture properly belong to all who have the will (voluntas) and the skills (facultas) to look for them. In this case, the "little something" added is a devotional work, gathering testimony of many voices in honor of Mary, "the only beloved of Christ" (unicae dilectae Christi Mariae).

In the dedicatory epistle to Thietmar of Verden, Rupert presents his mariological commentary as a devotional meditation on the Divine Word, Christ, who lives in the human heart and who was incarnated on earth. He describes this meditation as dictated "as much as possible in contemplation of the face of our lady, Mary holy and ever-virgin," perhaps in meditation on a devotional image, and offers the work as a bell (tintinabulum) to an old friend whose "ringing" preaching of the Gospel Rupert still remembers.

The prologue, which dedicates the work to Abbot Cuno of Siegburg, describes it as a spiritual battle like that of Jacob with the angel, a proper wrestling match with the mysteries God has placed in Scripture. In the development of this battle metaphor, Mary appears as both the courtly lady and the armorer:

Therefore, O Lady, Godbearer, true and uncorrupt mother of the Word eternally God and man, Jesus Christ; armed not with my but with your merits, I wish to wrestle with this same man, that is, with the Word of God, and to wrench out a work on the Song of Songs which it would not be unseemly to call De incarnatione Domini, to the praise and glory of that Lord, and to the praise and glory of your blessedness.

Some years earlier, Rupert explains, he had been inspired by the Virgin to attempt a verse work on the Song, a project he found himself unable to carry through. It is worth noting that Peter Heliae did eventually accomplish Rupert's youthful goal in a long unpublished verse commentary on the Song of Songs dating from around 1148. But Rupert's meditation on the Song of Songs, however passionate and direct, is still in focus and structure an unmistakable prose commentary. The prologue relates the Song of Songs to seven biblical songs (which are not those of Origen), and then offers a structural division of the Song of Songs into four (rather unequal) parts punctuated by the repeated refrain:

adiuro vos filiae Hierusalem
  per capreas cervosque camporum
ne suscietis neque evigilare faciatis
  dilectam quoadusque ipsa veldt

I adjure you, daughters of Jerusalem
  by the goats and the stags of the field
neither arouse nor cause to awaken
  my beloved until she wishes.

This commentary thus conceives the Song of Songs to be divided at 2:7, 3:5, and 8:4 by an injunction to let the beloved sleep.

Furthermore, Rupert says he will base his interpretation on a foundation of historical or actual deeds:

For, indeed, the mystical exposition will be more firm, nor will it be allowed to fluctuate, if it is held to be built on the history of certain times or rationally demonstrable things.

With respect to the division of the text, this rhetorical structure seems to be Rupert's original, if not terribly influential, insight. Its relationship to the treatise, however, is partial. The commentary is actually divided into seven books, only the first two of which are marked by the rhetorical exclamation beginning "I adjure you, daughters of Jerusalem." Books three to seven take the text roughly a chapter at a time, but across the chapter divisions; the third "adiuro vos" comes without special notice in the middle of the last book.

With respect to Rupert's concern to base the expositio mystica in history or "real deeds," the commentary presents a challenge equal to its structure. The opening verse, "Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth," is immediately placed in the mouth of the Virgin Mary, whose state of spiritual rapture is described by two biblical verses: "what eyes have not seen and ears have not heard and the heart of man has not reached" (I Corinthians 2:9), and "Behold the handmaid of the Lord, do unto me according to your word" (Luke 1:38). Here it seems to be the historical sense that speaks of the Virgin Mary, or rather, that is the spiritually elevated moment of her speaking these words. Likewise, the "little foxes" of 2:15 refer to Herod, whom Jesus called "that fox" (Luke 13:32); again, the words are placed in Mary's mouth. The rhetorical shift here is from "spoken about" to "speaking," a movement that is directly tied to content, since both of these passages also relate directly to the birth of Jesus.

Other places, in contrast, seem to have a sense of universal history, relating Mary both to Eve before her and to the Church which she helped to found. For example, the interpretation of 1:11, "my nard gave forth its fragrance," relates Eve's "stink of pride" to Mary's sweet-smelling nard of humility. Far more complex is the interpretation of 4:12-15, where the "garden enclosed" is described in lush detail. The verse is immediately likened to the paradise planted by God:

That one is the ancient paradise, the earthly paradise; this one is the new paradise, the celestial paradise. And the planter of each is the one and the same Lord God. In that one he placed the man he had formed, in this one he formed the man who with him in the beginning was God. "From [that] soil he brought forth all trees that are beautiful to the sight, and sweet to the taste, and the tree of life in the middle of paradise." He blessed this soil, this his earth, and he brought forth from it the seeds of all graces and the models (exemplaria) of all virtues. And that tree of life is Christ, God and man, the lord of the celestial paradise.

The repetition of the words hortus conclusus in the text of the Song of Songs indicates to Rupert that the verses speak of Mary, who was conclusa, "closed," both when she conceived, and at the moment of the birth of Jesus.

The interpretation of the garden continues with a series of juxtapositions to the four cosmological corners of the earth: the four parts of paradise, "the four sacraments necessary for salvation" (Christ's incarnation, passion, resurrection, ascension), the four evangelists (man, ox, lion, eagle), the four rivers (Nile, Ganges, Tigris, Euphrates). Each of these sets of four, on a different order of reality, stands in a special relationship to the Virgin, who is represented by the garden divided into four parts. The structure is established in reference to the salvation history which was so elaborately developed in the second Song of Songs commentary of Honorius.

Analysis of any part of Rupert's commentary on the Song of Songs "de incarnatione Domini" brings us up against many traditional elements of the Song of Songs commentary genre. Rupert interprets the text, although in relation to the Virgin Mary, by means of Cassian's allegorical and tropological modes. Mary is totally identified with the female speaker of the Song of Songs, and then she is interpreted according to the standard modes of Song of Songs exegesis. According to the allegorical mode, Mary becomes here not only the symbol of the Church, but the embodiment of it. On the tropological level, she is also the model of monastic virtues: virginity, humility, and obedience.

These dual roles were conceived and forged in a period of great contemplative emphasis on the Virgin Mary, by a man who freely admitted to using the Virgin as a focus for contemplation on the incarnation of Christ. In some ways, then, Rupert's treatise can be seen to participate in developing trends of the cult of the Virgin. Even more, considered from the point of view of Song of Songs commentary, Rupert's work is evidence of the great complexity which the commentary genre had achieved by the twelfth century. This flexible multivalence in the service of marian doctrine may have had a direct impact on Honorius (in whose long commentary are found many of the same themes), and a more dispersed influence on other commentators, including those who did specifically choose a consciously mariological mode of interpretation, rather than just marian content. The importance of Rupert's example is seen, for example, in the late twelfth-century commentary of Alan of Lille.

Like Honorius, Alan is a twelfth-century figure who defies simple categorization. He was thoroughly a man of the schools, having studied at Paris and perhaps at Chartres; yet he died a Cistercian, in fact, a monk of Citeaux. An early work, the De planctu Naturae, in which Lady Nature (Natura) laments the disaster humanity has made of creation, became a set school text and was regularly studied into the age of printing. This treatise served as an introduction to a more refined and difficult allegory of Natura, the Anticlaudianus. Alan's youthful fame was based on these books and a number of other school texts.

Yet Alan experienced a sort of conversion when he went to teach in Montpellier, and encountered the spiritual battle which pitted the Cathars and Waldensians against the Cistercian Order. In this tumultous spiritual environment, he began to write catechetical works, eventually commenting on the Our Father, various creeds, and the Song of Songs. These are also teaching texts, but focused on "practical" rather than "speculative" theology, and tied to the cloister schools. G. R. Evans has written about Alan:

No doubt if he had been born a little later, he would have become one of the Friars Preachers. The Dominican Order in the thirteenth century would have been able to make use of his talents as a scholar and a teacher in a way that no single Order or school could do in the twelfth.

But, of course, Alan was not born a bit later. He was an example of a counter-movement in twelfth-century Christian history, a movement from the schools to the monasteries. He is by no means alone in this twelfth-century pattern, which can also be seen in the lives of Honorius Augustodunensis and Peter Abelard. Evidently, the monastic life of prayer and study still held appeal to late twelfth-century intellectuals, and was able to absorb Alan's talents as a teacher and preacher. In this environment, especially considering his opposition to the Cathars, it is little wonder that Alan turned to exegesis of the Song of Songs. In doing so, he participated in a literary tradition which by this time had developed a highly complex articulation of bodily language for the love between God and the orthodox Church, the individual soul, and the type of both, the Virgin Mary.

Alan may have commented on the Bible in a systematic way, in either a cloister or a cathedral school. A set of unpublished glosses on the songs of the Old and New Testaments makes use of the rhetorical framework of the accessus ad auctores found in Honorius: titulus, materia, intentio, modus agendi. This scholastic compilation may have been recorded by Alan's pupils, or it may have been Alan's own work book, one of the sources from which he made exegetical lectures. In Cantica Canticorum ad laudem Deiparae Virginis Mariae elucidatio, the only one of his biblical commentaries to survive, was probably one of those lectures. Significantly, it was written down only at the special request of the prior of Cluny, and is extant in copies from important monastic houses: Klosterneuburg, Fleury, and St. Marien. This text, which probably dates from Alan's years at Citreaux, thus provides an unusual glimpse into his monastic teaching plan, and the role played in it by the Song of Songs.

Alan's Elucidatio on the Song of Songs makes references to both the spiritual elite and the life of contemplation, in specifying the difference between the Bridegroom's "manifest" teaching through the windows and the "more obscure" teaching through the lattices of Song of Songs 2:9. The Church in the world is also a major concern of the treatise, often leading to a type of exegetical preaching, as in this open condemnation of the "little foxes" of Song of Songs 2:15:

"Catch for us the little foxes, who destroy the vineyards." By "foxes," which are tricky animals living in caves in the earth, the heretics are understood; by "vineyards," the Churches are understood. The heretics demolish these same vineyards by any means they can. Inasmuch as they decry Christ and his mother, they work to weaken [var. sicken] the faith of the Church. Therefore, these can be the words of the faithful to Christ and to the Virgin: "catch for us," that is, pull down to our service, "the foxes," that is, the heretics, "little," on account of imbecility; since as much as they struggle against the Church, so much will they be sickened. "Who destroy the vineyards," that is, they draw away from ecclesiastical faith.

This passage demonstrates the extreme rhetorical clarity of Alan's style, a style especially adapted for teaching. The commentary is systematic, straightforward, and, as the relation of the "little foxes" to heretics suggests, somewhat traditional in its interpretations. Even the addition of the Virgin Mary to the interpretation is always in tandem with Christ and/or the Church. Alan's calm, didactic voice contrasts rather sharply with the breathless devotional tone of Rupert's commentary, yet it is clear that the two treatises are closely connected at the level of content.

Alan, for example, repeats Rupert's argument about the way in which the Song of Songs refers to the Virgin Mary:

Thus, although the song of love, that is, the wedding hymn of Solomon, rather specially and spiritually refers to the Church, nevertheless, it relates most specially and spiritually to the Virgin, as we will explain (insofar as we can) by divine command. Therefore, the glorious Virgin, hoping for the presence of the spouse, desiring the glorious conception announced by the angel, striving for the divine Incarnation, says: "Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth."

In his interpretation of 1:14, "behold you are fair/your eyes of doves," Alan is yet more explicit about the way the Virgin functions in the multiple levels of meaning of the Song of Songs, "as the divine Scriptures should be understood not according to the letter, but according to the spirit, and spiritual mystery should be seen in them." In one sense, the Virgin's part in the narrative of the Song of Songs is on the allegorical level, it has to do with this world, with the incarnation of Christ on earth. Yet, the anagogical sense is also evoked with the phrase "behold you are fair," understood as "having to do with the age to come" (ad futurum saeculum pertinet), since the Virgin represents human perfection. Alan sets his interpretation within both the accepted commentary tradition and the developing framework of marian devotion. For instance, Song of Songs 1:16, "the beams of our house are of cedar," is understood as both the body of Christ (which is the Church), and the body of Mary. With an open quotation from the Pseudo-Augustinian sermons, Alan makes an explicit connection to the Assumption:

For just as we believe that the body of Christ was not dissipated by decay, as it is written "You will not give your Holy one to see corruption," (Psalm 15:10, Vulgate), thus it is probable that the body of Mary is alien to the corruption of decay: Thus Augustine says in the sermon De Assumptione Virginis: "We believe not only the flesh which Christ assumed, but even the flesh from which he assumed flesh, to have been assumed into heaven."

In the exposition of Song of Songs 4:8, "come from Lebanon / come, you will be crowned," Alan combines the traditional place-name allegories with yet another manifestation of late twelfth-century marian devotion, the celebration of the Coronation of the Virgin:

From these mountains, then, the glorious Virgin is crowned: when the princes of this world are converted to the faith, and received into eternal beatitude, and they withdraw into the company and the praise of the Virgin. From the peaks of these mountains she is crowned, when by the princes subject to the catholic faith she is praised and glorified in Christ.

This passage indicates that the concept of the Coronation of the Virgin, a devotion which grew rapidly in the late twelfth century, is closely linked to the eschatological expectation of the glorified Church, "when the princes of this world are converted to the faith, and received into eternal beatitude." This association is made explicit by a number of manuscript illuminations in which the crowned Church and the crowned Virgin are distinguishable only through accompanying motifs. Alan's imagery is extremely flexible; at some points, the Virgin and the Church seem to have become symbolically merged:

For the Virgin Mary is similar to the Church of God in many ways. Just as the Church of God is the mother of Christ in its members through grace; thus the Virgin is the mother of Christ, of its head through human nature. And just as the Church is without spot or wrinkle, even so is the glorious Virgin.

As Riedlinger notes, this comes close to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, a concept which did not become dogma until the nineteenth century.

The Elucidatio of Alan of Lille shows the full complexity of mariological Song of Songs commentary. The Mary of this treatise is rather like one of the allegorical personifications of Alan's De planctu Naturae and Anticlaudianus, far abstracted from any human woman. Alan even stresses Mary's elevation by portraying a very different biblical figure, Mary Magdalene, as acting out some narrative parallels between the Gospels and the Song of Songs. So it is Mary Magdalene who mourns, "widowed for her spiritual man, that is, Christ"; the Magdalene's search for Christ at the tomb is recollected from the Song of Songs 3:1 "on my bed through the nights/I sought him whom my soul loves"; it is to the garden in which this Mary sought him that Christ descends in Song of Songs 6:1. As for the Virgin Mary, her appearance in the Song of Songs has much the same function as Alan's Natura: to urge the human gaze upwards, "from history to the mystical sense." She is the model and the inspiration for the mystical life.

CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF MARIAN EXEGESIS

This discussion of medieval readings of the Song of Songs in relation to the Virgin Mary suggests that the tradition is not just "marian," relating to Mary, or even "mariological," having to do with doctrinal definitions regarding Mary, but also specifically linked to worship. The liturgical background of this mode of Song of Songs exegesis brings a level of specific devotional participation into the commentary tradition, participation in the growing cult of the Virgin. Marian commentary on the Song of Songs is a special case of the transformation of a primary genre into a secondary genre, of what Bakhtin has described as the ability of secondary genres to:

absorb and digest various primary (simple) genres that have taken form in unmediated speech communication. These primary genres are altered and assume a special character when they enter into complex ones. They lose their immediate relation to actual reality and to the real utterances of others.

Of course, liturgy is in itself a formalized type of speech genre. Though not so flexible as other forms of spoken discourse, it is nevertheless an oral, performative, form of communication and, hence, in spite of repeated medieval efforts at standardization, open to myriad adaptations. When a verse from the Song of Songs was sung as an antiphon for the Assumption of the Virgin, it was transformed from God's voice speaking to humans (the "direct communication" of biblical revelation) to human voices speaking to heaven (to the Virgin Mary and to God) in praise and petition. I have suggested … that the direct address of liturgical language greatly influenced the voice of early marian commentaries on the Song of Songs. Yet, as this conception of the Song of Songs was "digested" by the commentary tradition, the immediacy of liturgical communication was changed into a far more mediated literary form. The antiphons of the Virgin still rang in the ears of Rupert and Alan, but their sound was muted; they had become simply another source for mariological commentary.

The interpretations considered in this [essay], therefore, are the most striking example of Song of Songs commentary as a secondary or "complex" genre. Here, the image of the Virgin Mary has no one fixed form, but changes shape from liturgy to commentary, from verse to verse. Mary is seen as at once the Church and the soul, the Bride, mother, and child of God. She is seen in the historical, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical levels of understanding the Song of Songs. Ann Astell has described marian interpretation of the Song of Songs as "historicized allegory." … [T]here is no tradition of Song of Songs commentary specifically in the anagogical mode, but the Virgin Mary, as type of both the Church and the soul, incorporates this level of understanding rather explicitly. Mariological exegesis of the Song of Songs, in fact, incorporates the entire tradition of Song of Songs commentary throughout the Latin Middle Ages, absorbing every level of understanding which it had inherited. These works are not necessarily the most structurally or rhetorically complicated interpretations of the Song of Songs (Rupert and Alan, for example, do not come close to the elaborate structure of Honorius's second exposition), but they are conceptually and typologically more complex, resonating with a whole other world of Christian spirituality, devotion to the Virgin.

Perhaps mariological commentaries on the Song of Songs also signal the waning, even the exhaustion, of the commentary tradition, as they look out to concerns which go beyond the limits of a monastic literary genre. By the twelfth century, a complex allegorical understanding of the Song of Songs had spread into numerous traditions of popular devotion to the Virgin, traditions visible over subsequent centuries and even into our own. Devotion to the Virgin Mary is still an important, some would say a growing, aspect of western Christianity. The "Marian Year" proclaimed by Pope John Paul II from the Feast of the Assumption, 1987 to the same feast of 1988 reflects the enormous amount of belief in and veneration of the Virgin in twentieth-century Christianity, a religious phenomenon which is only beginning to be analyzed from the perspective of the history of Christianity. The Song of Songs commentary genre came into confluence only briefly with this vibrant tradition of marian devotion. There are, actually, relatively few marian commentaries on the Song of Songs, mostly from one period—the twelfth century. These did not so much change the development of marian devotion as testify to one stage of it, one predominantly liturgical voice and its devotional and theological ramifications.

It should also be noted that even the earliest uses of verses from the Song of Songs in liturgies of the Virgin are evidence of a function of the Song of Songs throughout the Middle Ages on a different literary level from that of the commentary tradition, namely, as proof-texts or biblical tropes. This use was by no means totally divorced from the genre of Song of Songs commentary begun by Origen; in fact, it was often informed by the patterns and expectations which consistently structured the genre in time. But this use does indicate a different "horizon of expectations" against which the Song of Songs was also read, and which exerted greater influence on this form of commentary than on the traditional ecclesiological and tropological readings. The difficult relationship between broad reference and commentary is a sign of the continual outward expansion of the genre. It is also the most striking characteristic of … the influence of Song of Songs commentary on the vernacular literature of the later Middle Ages, both devotional and secular.