Fervent expressions of erotic desire, the beauty and terror of passionate arousal, are here uncovered in religious texts, creation myths, ‘arts of love’, poetry and fiction across four millenia and twenty-four cultures. The chapter starts with an example known throughout the world: the Hebrew love poem preserved as The Song of Songs or Song of Solomon, translated into many languages including German, Chinese and Yoruba, emulated by Oscar Wilde and Toni Morrison. It argues that the Song and related literature are significant for the frank celebration of mutuality and orgasm, and the psychological understanding of cruelty and loss, rather than for their supposed spiritual meanings. These central themes are traced back to the most ancient narratives of primal copulation (including the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh) and forward to intensely sexual episodes in Milton, Goethe, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and women authors from Mediaeval mystics up to the present. A closely related literary genre turns love-making into an art form, cultivated for its own sake: examples come from ancient Egypt and Rome, the Indian Kama Sutra, the Arabic Perfumed Garden, the Modi of Aretino in Renaissance Italy, and French, Chinese and Japanese novels of sexual instruction and adventure.

This section contains excerpts from two sermons, one from the thirteenth century by Thomas of Chobham who wrote a number of sermons, a work on preaching and a work on virtues and vices, and one anonymous sermon in macaronic form, from the fifteenth century, in which Latin and English are blended to create a syntactically homogeneous whole. The purpose of such macaronic sermons is unclear. The third item in this section is a short ghost-story, which appears in a commonplace book, and was possibly used in a sermon to make a point about the importance of the Mass for remission from time in Purgatory.

Seventeenth-century English poetry is renowned for its religious lyric, especially that of Herbert, Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan and Traherne. In Chapters 2 and 3 we saw how the interest in metrical and formal variety, which is such a marked feature of Herbert’s 'Temple' (1633), can be traced back to the Latin poetic experiments and innovations of the latter sixteenth century, and specifically to the technical and tonal variety of the most influential of the psalm paraphrase collections. This chapter deals in large part with another of the influences upon Herbert’s distinctive style – namely the largely (though not exclusively) Jesuit poetics of Latin devotional verse, which combined with the tradition of formal variety, scriptural paraphrase and religious epigram to revolutionary effect in seventeenth-century England. It traces the development of religious verse in England from the mid-sixteenth through to the early eighteenth century, and describes how the new kind of devotional lyric was read and written alongside older types of religious verse, especially scriptural and devotional epigram and paraphrase.

J. L. Andruska sees close affinities between the Song of Songs and Wisdom Literature. She acknowledges that this is a minority position, surveying the history of reception, which has offered various alternative interpretations (e.g. literal, allegorical, cultic, feminist). She then defines Wisdom Literature, centralising the forms found in ANE advice literature, the concern for wisdom, and the intended character transformation of the audience. All of these are found in the Song. Andruska discusses the mashal (proverb) in 8:6-7 and the intergenerational instructions found in the refrains (2:7, 3:5, 8:4). She argues that the Song offers wisdom about love, didactically advocating one particular vision of love (in contrast to other ANE love songs, which give varied depictions of love). The purpose of the Song is to transform its readers into wise lovers who follow the example of the lovers in the Song.

explores the origins and implications of the political marriage metaphor deployed by King James to buttress his growing prerogative and by godly ministers to articulate their principled resistance. Because women served as ideal surrogates for political subjects who merited “reasonable liberty” while accepting monarchical rule, domestic conduct guides such as William Whately’s offered coded discussions of political rights and duties, including a woman’s obligation to obey her conscience. In addition, oppositional uses of the passionate and militant female voice in the Song of Songs championed Christ’s independent jurisdiction over the faithful to the exclusion of earthly kings. Echoing the voice of the wife as political subject in marriage sermons, the desiring voice of the spouse as Church united male and female subjects seeking to be joined with an attentive Head committed to mutuality and recognition of her needs.

establishes Southwell’s Puritan allegiances and situates her within a wider godly community that included Walter Raleigh, Francis Quarles, and Roger Cocks, male authors equally committed to trenchant political critique of early Stuart kings and court. Writing exclusively in manuscript, Southwell challenges the politics of both King James and King Charles in the contentious decades of the early seventeenth century. Much like Whately, Speght, and Lanyer, Southwell deploys a politically-charged domestic rhetoric not only to represent the wife as counselor to her husband but also to rhapsodize a prospective union with the ideal bridegroom and husband, Christ.

This chapter explores two texts produced in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: the Exortacio ad contemplacionem, and the Meditaciones of the Monk of Farne. It argues that the Exortacio retains thematic ties with the topographical interests of Geoffrey’s Vita Bartholomaei, but exchanges its earlier assertions of heroic presence for a contemporary stance of abjection and deprivation. There is no efficacious saint in this poem, only the unremitting hostility of the natural elements. By contrast, the Meditaciones disregards the physical environment altogether. Turning rapturously to Christ and his prophets and apostles in their bibical milieu, it advances Cuthbertine asceticism to previously unscaled heights, comprising one of the most overlooked landmarks in late medieval contemplative composition. Nonetheless, the text’s approach to the Anglo-Saxon saint who has given Farne its contemplative potential remains uneasy, and the chapter demonstrates that Cuthbert is substantially delimited in force in favour of a pantheon of biblical saints.

A great deal of literature attempts to reimagine, rework, revamp, retrieve – in short, retell – the Bible. The growing body of work known as “biblical reception history” is devoted to studying this phenomenon. The essay continues down this productive path: first a review of the biblical Song of Songs, noting the points most salient for understanding later retellings; next, detailing what biblical retellings are and how we might define them. Turning to the essay’s focus, there is close analyses of the novel Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977) and the short story “Song of Songs” by Darcey Steinke (2004) as they interact with the Bible. These stories show how biblical retellings are like a field, with some closer to the center (i.e. the Bible) than others. The essay concludes by suggesting why retellings exist in the first place.