This article addresses an aspect of the seventeenth-century milieu that has not received the scholarly attention it deserves: how Ukrainian Orthodox literati received, adapted, and transformed the Song of Songs and its bridal imagery. At the crossroads between the Catholic West and the Byzantine East, seventeenth-century Ukraine is a fascinating case study of the shifts of meaning and intended audience of the particular biblical book and its exegetical tradition. In particular, I examine how some of the most influential early modern Ukrainian writers (Lazar Baranovych, Ioanikii Galiatovs’kyi, Stefan Iavors’kyi, and Dymytrii Tuptalo) used the Song as a template for meditating on the nature of the Church as they envisioned it – as an instrume...