Ecclesia & Synagoga: Gendered Allegory in Latin Medieval Commentary on Ruth, Esther, and Judith

Medieval Christian commentators mobilize the Ecclesia/Synagoga pair not as a settled allegory but as a flexible interpretive instrument for negotiating Christianity’s simultaneous claims of continuity with Israel and rupture from Israel. Rather than functioning as fixed metaphors attached to stable characters, “Church” and “Synagogue” operate as positions that can be reassigned, doubled, or layered, even within a single reading, so that one figure can bear contradictory meanings at once: origin and displacement, inheritance and supersession. This article argues that exegetes turn especially to biblical women, and to relationships between women, because the theological work supersession is meant to secure cannot be held by opposition alone. The hermeneutical framework succeeds precisely because it is unstable, and that instability is generated and managed through “thinking with women,” a method shaped by feminist accounts of gender as a site of intellectual and cultural negotiation alongside insights from conceptual metaphor theory. By remapping Ecclesia and Synagoga across female bodies and female bonds, commentators can assert dependence on Israel while narrating its displacement, and can hold continuity and rupture together without resolving their contradiction.