SOURCE: "The Woman Who is the All: The Virgin Mary and the Song of Songs," in The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990, pp. 151-77.

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...