From Annotations to Commentary: New Spectacles on the Song of Songs

This chapter investigates the peculiarly influential text of the Song of Songs in the Interregnum by looking at its representation in the aids to Biblical interpretation that proliferated in the first half of the seventeenth century. Biblical commentary was itself politicised, almost from its inception in English Reformed thought: what is charted here is a phenomenon that was at its most intellectually influential in the 1640s and 1650s after the collapse of Church of England authority. This chapter looks in detail at some of the mid-century interpretations of the Song of Songs, and then discusses the tradition of commentary that continued into the Restoration. The significance of a particular interpretation of the Song of Songs was maintained until the end of the century, and within certain Dissenting circles, well beyond.