Spiritual marriage symbolism takes center stage in the present book. Most of its essays explore shades of meaning interpreters attached to the notion from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages. This contribution does not add to the conceptual analysis of previous chapters, but addresses instead the issue of relative historical significance. Visitors to the Roman church of Santa Maria in Trastevere just need to look up to the splendidly decorated apse (described by Lasse Hodne in Chapter 10) in order to appreciate the centrality of spiritual marriage imagery in that space. But what about the relative importance of the same motif in other contexts? Before the advent of scholastic culture in the twelfth century, it is difficult to weigh the impact of an idea beyond assertions that a particular understanding of it was more or less widespread. Scholastic thinkers, on the other hand, were quite explicit in assigning degrees of relevance to traditional concepts such as spiritual marriage as they engaged in novel efforts to harmonize and systematize ecclesiastical doctrine. The first few generations of canon lawyers, I will argue, attributed only a marginal role to Christ's union with the Church when crafting the laws of sacramental marriage and priestly ordination.

From the twelfth century onward, the idea that there existed an unbreakable matrimonial bond between Christ and his Church permeated the thought of ecclesiastical lawyers (also known as canonists) no less than it affected the reflections of theologians.