Abstract
With meticulous scholarly industry, Camilla Caporicci explores and demonstrates the complex place of the Song of Songs in Western literature over the ages – distinctly sacred and profane, and often both together. Her book offers a wealth of readings from the early church commentaries, above all Origen in the third century, through the devotional practices and love lyrics of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance in Italy, France and England. The Song’s links are complex – religious, cultural, political – and made more complex by its later connections with the tradition of classical literature, above all Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Caporicci’s study begins and ends with the Song as an epithalamium, a wedding song of love by a bride for her bridegroom. Thus it was for Origen and also in the Epithalamium of Edmund Spenser (1595). Origen is perfectly well aware of the powerful erotic potential of the Song, warning everyone who is ‘not yet free of the vexations of the flesh and blood’ to abstain from reading the book until a more spiritual stage is reached when its energies can be spiritualized into a love for the bridegroom, who is the Word of God.
It is this tension between sacred and profane love that gives the Song its energy and allurements, combined perhaps most beautifully in the poetry of Dante with the ‘sublime convergence of human and divine loves’ (p. 88). Caporicci’s title focuses on the Renaissance love lyric, but her book offers a far larger review than this, her first chapter tracing the rise of the medieval love lyric in the tradition of the troubadours and amour courtois. The pivot of the book in the transition to ‘modern poetry’ is the Canzoniere of Francesco Petrarch (1304–74), in whose poetry medieval polyvalence begins to separate out in a ‘painful awareness of an essential difference between earthly and divine love’ (p. 123). In Petrarch, love is negotiated between the classical and biblical traditions, and as the Renaissance develops in writers and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno the difficulty of appropriating the biblical text for ‘secular’ love lyrics becomes ever more apparent. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on Italian and French literature and poetry, tracing the growing complexities of the development of the vernacular in biblical translation, the theologies of the Reformation and the political-religious use of the imagery of the Song to portray such figures as Elizabeth I of England. Caporicci finely traces the modulations of male and female poets such as Marguerite of Navarre, and then in England Elizabeth Melville and Aemilia Lanyer.
Caporicci concludes her study with a review of English literature from Thomas Campion to Shakespeare, Marlowe and finally Spenser. The ever creative and uneasy tension between the religious and the erotic is ambiguously expressed by Sir Philip Sidney in his Defence of Poesy (1595) in which the Song of Songs is classified with Ecclesiastes, Proverbs and the Psalms to be used as ‘the poetical part of the Scripture’, while Sidney, despite being the author of Astrophel and Stella, appears to condemn poetry devoted to secular love (p. 397). Caporicci ends with a fine commentary on Spenser.
This book is the product of many years of precise and detailed scholarship and will set a standard for all studies of the complex and often uneasy history of the Song of Songs within Western literature and devotion. It makes its demands on the reader but rewards close attention as a scholarly exercise in theology and literature on the sheer energy and beauty – divine and profane – of the Song of Songs.