Shuve ends his book with the following words, “It is my hope that this book has, at least in some small way, begun to show the surprising ways that this poem about two lovers [that is, the Song of Songs] shaped the discursive and liturgical traditions of Western Christianity” (219). It sure has—elegantly and with insight!

Shuve's monograph is a heavily revised and expanded version of his dissertation and it examines “hundreds of citations of and allusions to the Song in the writings of Latin Christian theologians of the third and fourth centuries” (vii). Within the purview of the major sections of the book, one finds an assessment of the, at times, interrelated writings of Cyprian, the Donatists, Pacian, Tyconius, Augustine, Gregory of Elvira (the author of the only extant Latin commentary before the fifth century), Ambrose, and Jerome. Various chapters add Optatus, Victorinus of Poetovio, Reticius of Autun, Jovinian, Julian of Eclanum, Bede, and Paschasius Radbertus. There are occasional references to Origen as well, but Shuve decisively resists the impression that the “early Latin interpretation of the Song . . . is largely . . . the history of the transmission of Origen's thought” (2). Instead, he investigates how an ancient Jewish love-song “influenced the process of Christian self-definition” (13), as its surplus of meaning was employed to investigate the demarcation of ecclesial bodies, as well as the purity of individual souls and female virgins.

Shuve begins his monograph by assessing a modern presumption about the task of interpreting the Song of Songs in late antiquity which perceives this text as a problem to be solved—“to bury the raw eroticism of the Song under a mountain of spiritual commentaries” (vii). Countering this presumption, the author sets out to demonstrate that the given text was treated “as an explanans, not an explanadum” (vii). This means that, instead of being tamed and submitted to a forceful baptism, the Song of Songs was used for shedding scriptural light on various controversial issues.

Shuve takes Cyprian to be “the unlikely father of Latin exegesis of the Song” (20; see 34), who turned to the words “garden enclosed,” “sealed font,” and “a well of living water” (Song of Songs 4:12, 15) to bolster his case against schismatics and heretics, as well as to protect the clear boundaries of the “true” church during his various ecclesiastical controversies. Since Cyprian is given such prominence in Shuve's study, the lack of references to some more recent seminal studies (for example, Geoffrey D. Dunn, Cyprian and the Bishops of Rome: Questions of Papal Primacy in the Early Church [Strathfield: St. Pauls, 2007] and Henk Bakker, Paul van Geest, and Hans van Loon, eds., Cyprian of Carthage: Studies in His Life, Language, and Thought [Leuven: Brill, 2010]) is somewhat disappointing.

The author's analysis of Pacian, Tyconius, and Augustine, which is contrasted to that of Cyprian, brings up the issue of the church being a “mixed body” of people. However, one must guard against misconstruing Shuve's argument here, for the differences of what this mixture is taken to be by these three authors does not seem to come across with sufficient clarity. Tyconius's doctrine of the bipartite church uses the image of two cities and emphasizes the eschatological separation of the “left” and “right” part of the church. If readers take Shuve's remark “Augustine praises Tyconius for his doctrine of the church” (63) at its face value and do not consider the particular aspects of Tyconius's ecclesiology mentioned in Augustine's Letter 93.44, then things are going in the wrong direction. Tyconius's mixed church of boni and mali is not Augustine's corpus permixtum. The Bishop of Hippo could not and did not accept the idea that the body of Christ was ever bipartite. The church could be mixed (“black and beautiful” [chap. 1, p.5]), true, but it could not be bipartite, for it was a “lily among the horns” (chap. 2, p.1). Therefore, it is important to read Shuve's deliberations on page 76 very carefully.

Victorinus of Poetovio contended that the Old Testament had to be interpreted Christologically (that is, figuratively) (85). Accordingly, Gregory of Elvira's and Ambrose's exegesis of the Song makes sense only when this criterion is kept in mind. Otherwise their fascinating reading only causes the raising of one's eyebrows. Indeed, the question that needs to be answered by any interpreter is, “How can this erotic poem function as Scripture?”

Shuve follows Dawson in defining the literal sense not as a property of a text, but rather as its culturally “expected” meaning (5n16), or “automatically recognized” meanings (13). Thus, considering various ecclesio-cultural contexts, Shuve is investigating “how the Song would have sounded to . . . ancient readers” (209). However, arguably the meaning(s) of the Song of Songs was not so apparent to ancient interpreters. The plurality of interpretations coming from the same context (for example, Jerome's ascetic reading and Jovinian's anti-ascetic reading) would amply prove it (212). I would certainly agree with Shuve that the task was not at all to “resist the plain meaning of the Song” (209), but neither was it to hear its readily discernible overtones. Perhaps the justification of various figurative interpretations of the Song has something to do with the fact that certain critics of Christianity (for example, Celsus, Porphyry) had asserted that Christian Scripture was sort of mediocre, unsophisticated stuff—it was not composed allegorically and, therefore, it should not be interpreted allegorically (Origen, Contra Celsum 4.26–28, 7.18). Yet Origen, the undeniable exegetical authority, was convinced that the opposite was the case: “The Scriptures were composed through the Spirit of God and that they have not only that meaning which is obvious, but also another which is hidden from the majority of readers” (Peri Archōn, Prologue, 8).

Shuve's monograph is highly recommended, especially because it pulls together a tremendous amount of valuable information about the “afterlife” of the Song of Songs in Latin Christian antiquity and provides a superb assessment of its diverse interpretations.