“A garden enclosed, a fountain sealed”: The Song of Songs and its Ecclesiastical Significance in Seventeenth-century Ukraine

Abstract

This article addresses an aspect of the seventeenth-century milieu that has not received the scholarly attention it deserves: how Ukrainian Orthodox literati received, adapted, and transformed the Song of Songs and its bridal imagery. At the crossroads between the Catholic West and the Byzantine East, seventeenth-century Ukraine is a fascinating case study of the shifts of meaning and intended audience of the particular biblical book and its exegetical tradition. In particular, I examine how some of the most influential early modern Ukrainian writers (Lazar Baranovych, Ioanikii Galiatovs’kyi, Stefan Iavors’kyi, and Dymytrii Tuptalo) used the Song as a template for meditating on the nature of the Church as they envisioned it – as an instrument for thinking about a “collective” institution. I argue that these authors brought their involvement with ecclesiastical politics and pastoral responsibility to the exegesis of this book, using the Song, often in combination with imagery from the Apocalypse, to articulate and define the boundaries of the Kyiv Church during a time of crisis.