Summary: The Netherlandish Canticum Canticorum is a late 15th-century blockbook ordinarily bound with larger, more impressive, and better known blockbooks, particularly the Biblia Pauperum and the Speculum Humanae Salvationis. An Allegory of Divine Love offers the first art-historical analysis of the Canticum Canticorum, Latin for Song of Songs, as an independent work of art of the highest caliber: rather than the end of a long Gothic tradition, it is revealed as a major work of Early Renaissance art, full of beautiful compositions, original ideas, and an intellectual challenge to a devoted, reading public. This blockbook is composed of eight large sheets of paper, stacked and gathered in the center to form sixteen folios, printed by hand rubbing on one side only; there are four rectangular woodcut compositions involving haloed figures, landscapes and interiors, on each opening, with thirty-two scenes in all. As a blockbook, the Canticum's most salient feature is the fact that it has no printed identification. The sheets bear no page-signatures or rubrics. The framed scenes contain no titles. There is no commentary of any kind. The title page contains the words Canticum Canticorum, but nothing more. In the rest of the book, verbal matter consists solely of Latin inscriptions that appear in elaborately scrolling banderoles often as large as the figures. The verses quoted without identification seemingly have been chosen at random since, in the sequence, they do not follow the order of the biblical poem. But in fact, the characteristic of "order in disarray" relates to the literary form known as the cento, a sophisticated literary mode handed down from antiquity in which disparate passages from a venerable text are ingeniously selected and arranged to form a new work. All these elements distinguish the Canticum from other contemporary blockbooks. The author discusses each of the thirty-two framed scenes individually, as visual images within the larger framework of the history of art, as poetic dialogues composed of hallowed lines newly ordered to create a new poem, and as theological allusions in the form of human interaction. The result, in apperceiving the thirty-two scenes as a unified whole, is new narrative the plot of which becomes clear. It is suggested that contemporary readers were expected to do the same using observation, study, contemplation and devotion. And what they found is the story of the Virgin Mary's preparation for her divine role, as a model of action for every good soul in her/his "marriage with Christ". (Early Modern Catholicism and the Visual Arts, 10)

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