Continental Biblical Scholarship and the Sources of William Baldwin’s The Canticles or Balades of Salomon

Scholars have traditionally viewed William Baldwin’s 1549 poetic paraphrase of the Song of Songs, The Canticles or Balades of Salomon, as an enthusiastic but unsophisticated work, the attempt by a well-meaning but unlearned poet to impose evangelically tinged, Christian allegorical readings onto an Old Testament work of erotic Hebrew poetry. In fact, Baldwin draws for his Canticles on two learned works of continental European biblical scholarship. From the first, François Lambert’s In Cantica Canticorum … Commentarii, Baldwin obtained a model for the structure of his Canticles, a source for many of its allegorical interpretations, and inspiration for christological allegorical readings of his own. In the second, the Liber differentiarum Veteris Testamenti, Baldwin found scholarly glosses that permitted him to supply for his readers meanings for the Hebrew names in his text.