Medieval marriage symbolism carried assumptions and supported claims regarding structures of dominion and submission that lent themselves to political discourse. As Anna Rebecca Solevåg argues in this volume, a fundamental feature of the marriage symbolism in New Testament texts was that it mapped ‘kyriarchal’ marriage onto the organizational structure of the Church. Envisioning Christ as the kyrios of the household entails a particular interpretation of authority extending over the Christian community and its single members, metaphorically cast in the roles of wife, bride, children, and/or slaves. Medieval writers inherited this figurative language which they then proceeded to elaborate and expand by biblical intertexts and analogies. The liturgical and canonist metaphor of bishop as bridegroom of his see became common during the eleventh- and twelfth-century church reforms to assert episcopal authority in the Church and to shape clerical identities. Earlier still, in the Carolingian period, the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals had used the bishop-as-bridegroom metaphor to resist the instability of episcopal translations (by reference to adultery and divorce prohibitions). The metaphor of the bishop as bridegroom was contingent on the theory, timidly expressed in patristic writing and more forcefully asserted in ninth-century decretals, that bishops were the vicars of Christ, his representatives on earth.