ABSTRACT
In the Middle Ages (and especially in the eleventh century and twelfth century) the Song of Songs was a widely read text, the object of exegesis and a popular source of imagery and metaphor in the vernacular. Despite Jerome having said that it should be the last thing pupils expounded, it formed part of the set reading in a monastery education. From the earliest times, however, its erotic content was officially neutralized as a metaphor for the relationship between Christ and the Church. The German language’s most definitive version was composed c.1060 by Williram of Ebersberg who came from a well-connected middle Rhine noble dynasty and graduated from Fulda to the headship of the monastery school in Bamberg and then the Bavarian abbotry of Ebersberg, which was considered a stepping-stone to a bishopric. However, when his patron Henry III died, Henry IV, to whom the work was dedicated, refused to grant the author’s wish to be released from his ‘exile’ in Ebersberg.
