Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis. 170. Glossa ordinaria Pars 22 in Canticum Canticorum

Beryl Smalley proposed a programme for Glossa Ordinaria studies as long ago as 1961, consisting of the preparation of an edition of the gloss at the time it left the hands of Master Anselm of Laon and his circle. Such an edition would, she admitted, be 'un travail de longue haleine', but 'les études littéraires en bénéficeraient aussi bien que les études théologiques'. Reviewing the situation twenty years later, Smalley regretfully noted that no one as yet has made a critical edition of any part of the Gloss. Another ten years passed before an edition of the Gloss was published: this, however, was no new edition but a facsimile - albeit a most handsome and useful one - of the first printed edition of the Gloss, Adolph Rusch's Strassburg edition of 1480/81. The present edition of the Glossa Ordinaria on the Song of Songs is offered as a contribution to the programme Smalley proposed. While it does not pretend to be a full critical edition of the text, since a fully comprehensive investigation of the entire manuscript tradition would have ensured that this particular part of the Gloss would remain unedited this side of the new millennium, Smalley's suggestion of reproducing the early text of the Glossed Song of Songs, a text based on manuscripts dated c. 1120 - c.1170. Smalley was quite right to claim that the importance of the Gloss as a whole is as much literary as theological, and perhaps this makes the Glossed Song of Songs a particularly appropriate part of the whole to make available. Ever since this book of the Bible was given the title Shir haShirim, the best of songs, its literary excellence has always been recognised. To medievalists, the pervasiveness of its influence on the literature of the Middle Ages, in Latin and in the vernaculars, is a commonplace, yet the text that medieval writers were influenced by was rarely sola scriptura. This text and translation of the glossed Song of Songs, the most widely-transmitted of all late