Suzanne LaVere. Out of the Cloister

Of all the books of the Hebrew Bible, perhaps none was more stimulating to the imagination of medieval commentators than the Song of Songs. The evocative imagery of its poetry and the ambiguity of its message allowed Christian exegetes to read their own preoccupations into the text and thereby speak their restless minds. In particular, the text’s celebration of sensuality allowed a Christian readership to reflect on two contrasting experiences of love: the literal or physical love between humans and the metaphorical or allegorical love of God. Monastic authors concerned with the second and ostensibly higher form of love expended much of their exegetical (and celibate) energies in offering highly allegorized interpretations of the meaning behind the verses. The Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux composed a full eighty-six sermons based on his reading of the Song of Songs. Suzanne LaVere’s original study Out of the Cloister: Scholastic Exegesis of the Song of Songs, 1100–1250, pivots away from the much-studied monastic discourse on the Song of Songs toward what she characterizes as a “new species of commentary” that emerged among scholastic authors of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (2). LaVere wishes to show that this scholastic reading of the Canticles reflected the contemporary movement of church reform and an advocacy of living an active life through preaching. Some might question whether it is helpful to reinforce a distinction between two vocations that many scholars argue were inextricably connected and frequently overlapping, particularly during scholasticism’s pre-university phase. Moreover, this separation would seem hard to maintain given that the book essentially amounts to case studies of a small handful of scholastic commentators and their schools spread over the better part of a century and a half (in fact, the epilogue extends the analysis into the fourteenth century). Nevertheless, LaVere’s sensitive handling of a corpus of published and unpublished glosses makes a case for admitting an important, even if imperfect, separation between the chiefly affective or contemplative reading of monastic authors and the more active or sermon-oriented reading of the scholastics.

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