The Relationship between Text and Image in the Tradition of Illustrating the Song of Songs and the Adjacent Texts in the Western European Manuscripts of the 12th - the beginning of the 14th Centuries

In our research we are studying the problem of the interrelation between text and image in relation to the illustration of biblical book The Song of Songs. The relevance of this study lies in the absence at this time of a detailed classification of all possible ways of illustrating this text. The novelty of this research lies in studying the relationship between text and image, using a large number of different types of manuscripts from different regions, having specific features in their decorations and functions. The subject of this study is the peculiarities of the relationship between text and illustrations, connected with the Song of Songs, which are analyzed on the example of medieval manuscripts of the 12th-early 14th centuries. The object of our research is the tradition of illustrating the Song of Songs in the manuscripts of the period, pointed above. The main goal of the work is to identify and characterize the relationship between text and image, studying illustrations for the Song of Songs in the manuscripts of the 12th-early 14th centuries. The main methods of our research are the method of comparative and iconographic analysis. In the course of our study, it was established that the illustrations for the Song of Songs can be interpreted in three different ways: historically, allegorically and literally. They also can interact with each other in various combinations. Moreover, we found out that the interpretation of illustrations to the Song of Songs is often ambiguous. The main cause of this is the impact on the image of multi-level comments.