“The Time of Singing has Come”: The Lure of the Song of Songs for Today’s Composers and Songwriters

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter I
2. Contents V
3. The Song of Songs Through the Ages 1
4. Between Hippolytus and Athanasius: The Variety of Patristic Song of Songs’ Interpretations 11
5. “Dripping from the Lips of Sleeping Ones”: The Interpretation of the Song of Songs from Tannaitic Literature to the Palestinian Talmud 37
6. The Exegesis of all Exegeses: The Uniqueness of Shir HaShirim Rabbah’s Approach to the Song of Songs 55
7. “I Slept but My Heart Was Awake”: Rabbinic Interpretations of Song of Songs 5:2 71
8. Reading the Old English Life of Saint Mary of Egypt with Abbot Hadrian of Africa: The Influence of Byzantine Readings of the Song of Songs on Early Medieval England 89
9. Targum Song of Songs, the History of Israel, and the Study of Torah 115
10. Do Not Wake or Arouse Love: Erotics of Time and the Dream of Messianic Waiting 129
11. Of Songs and Sequels: The Song of Songs in the Hebrew Liturgical Poetry of Al-Andalus 145
12. A Vocabulary of Love: The Song of Songs in the Secular Hebrew Love Poetry from Muslim Spain 165
13. Bernard of Clairvaux: The Song of Songs as an Instruction on the Spiritual Life 177
14. Preaching the Song of Songs at Admont: A Minority Report from the Twelfth Century 199
15. Voices Shifting and Voices Layered: The Song of Songs in Medieval German Commentaries 213
16. An Ecology of Desire: Pierre d’Ailly’s First Theological Work, a Latin Commentary on the Song of Songs 241
17. Lovers, Gardens, and Wounds: An Exploration of the Medieval Iconographies of the Song of Songs 263
18. Singing the Song of Songs in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The Evidence of the Alamire Manuscripts 287
19. Early Modern Women Comment on the Song of Songs 311
20. Varieties of Reformed and Puritan Reception of the Song of Songs, 1550–1730 329
21. The Song of Songs in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany: Theology and Desire 347
22. The Song of Songs as a Drama: A Radical Change of Interpretation in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century 363
23. Love and Language: The Song of Songs in Scholem and Rosenzweig 393
24. “Black and Beautiful” (Song 1:5): A Key Verse in the Exegesis of the Song of Songs from Origen to Dieter Salbert’s Schwarz—wie die Teppiche Salomos (1971) 415
25. “I Am Black and Comely”: Literal and/or Allegorical Interpretations in Theology, Music, and Image, Especially in the Present Time 437
26. “The Time of Singing has Come”: The Lure of the Song of Songs for Today’s Composers and Songwriters 469
27. Contributors 483
28. Index 485