I Am My Beloved and My Beloved Is Mine: The Song of Songs, the Language of Affect, and Bridal Self-Imaging in Early Modern Ruthenia

In this article I examine the hundreds of citations and allusions to the Song of Songs contained in seventeenth-century Ukrainian sermons. I place these quotations within their historical and intellectual context, exploring how that very context affected and shaped the complexity of the Song’s appeal to some of the most influential early modern Ruthenian preachers: Lazar Baranovych, Ioanykii Galiatovs'kyi, Stefan Iavors'kyi, Simeon Polotskii, Antonii Radyvylovs'kyi, and Dymytrii Tuptalo (Dimitrii Rostovskii). Among the leading representatives of the Ruthenian Baroque, they left behind a multilingual literary legacy, drawing from different literary and cultural traditions (Orthodox Slavic, Polish, and Latin), maneuvering between competing allegiances, and enriching Ruthenian, Polish-Lithuanian, and Muscovite culture at the same time. I will argue here that a different concept of human nature as a composite of bodily senses and intellectual faculties, along with a rethinking of affect and imagination, provided a fertile context for their reading of the Song, one that allows us to characterize this group of clerical writers as an “emotional community” (Rosenwein) with a set of shared values and modes of expression. Although this is necessarily only a preliminary effort, I hope to show that there was a connection between the interest in the Song, the newly discovered power of emotions, and the perception of spiritual experience in nuptial terms and that this connection was a central aspect of seventeenth-century Ruthenian Orthodox religious discourse.