Marrying Christ: Bernard of Clairvaux and the Song of Songs in Aemilia Lanyer’s "Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1611, an Englishwoman named Aemilia Lanyer published a volume of poetry and prose titled Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Throughout the volume, which centres on an 1800-line retelling of Christ’s death and resurrection, Lanyer draws from the Song of Songs as well as other biblical texts to produce an image of Christ as a Bridegroom. In so doing, Lanyer inserts herself into a hermeneutical genealogy populated by both Protestant and Catholic writers. A key figure in this interpretive tradition is the twelfth-century abbot and mystic Bernard of Clairvaux, whose sermon cycle on the first part of the Song of Songs offers a detailed character study of the Bridegroom. This article examines the cross-confessional nature of the bridal-mystical tradition epitomized by Bernard before conducting a close reading of the images that Lanyer associates with Christ. Ultimately, this article suggests that Lanyer puts bridal theology to a new communal use by producing a devotional poetic space in which female readers can engage with each other through Christ and with Christ through each other.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".