Abstract
The introductory chapter by Engh and Turner gives an overview of how marriage served as a structuring frame in early Christianity and the Latin West and an outline of the individual chapters. Discussing the nature of symbolism and its importance to human cognition, the chapter positions the book within an ongoing dialogue between the humanities and cognitive science. These two fields share the basic assumption that producing, communicating, and recognizing meaning is a creative, contingent process – it is not something ‘already there,’ in a text or in an image, but is constructed and reconstructed by human minds in human bodies, in social and institutional spaces, and in natural and cultural environments. Understanding the ways humans process metaphor helps us understand the relation between various kinds of discourses and the ways people lived, thought, and believed.
Keywords: cognitive science and humanities; medieval religious symbolism; medieval exegesis; rhetoric; gender; conceptual metaphor theory; blending theory; compression; emergent meaning
Marriage symbolism was a prevalent feature of early Christian and medieval cultures. Practically all Christian writers – bishops, canonists, theologians, monks, friars, and nuns – as well as some manuscript illuminators and artisans portrayed Christ's union with the Church as a marriage. The image of the heavenly nuptials between male divinity (Christ) and female humanity (Church) lies at the heart of the present study, since conceiving of this union as a marriage not only provided the fundamental principle for the doctrine – emergent in the twelfth century – which defined marriage as a sacrament, but also shaped the metaphorical understanding of virginity as marriage to Christ and priesthood as marriage to the Church. Marriage was a structuring frame, even for men and women who chose not to enter into it.
Grounded on the Letter to the Ephesians 5:22–33, the Song of Songs, Revelation, Psalm 44, and other biblical texts with nuptial themes, early Christian and medieval writers found rich hermeneutical possibilities to explore Christ's union with the Church or the saintly soul as a marriage. Long before the sacramental theories of marriage emerged as a major issue in the medieval West, theologians and exegetes delved into nuptial and conjugal metaphors to negotiate and establish a series of ecclesiological, political, devotional, theological, and juridical concerns.