Frauenlob's Song of Songs: A Medieval German Poet and his Masterpiece By Barbara Newman, with the critical text by Karl Stackmann and a musical performance on CD by the Ensemble Sequentia directed by Barbara Thornton and Benjamin Bagby. University Park, PA: the Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. Pp. xxi + 242. $25.

Why Song of Songs? Barbara Newman's choice of title for this brilliantly successful and ambitious book indicates the vast potential reach of its object of study, the erotically charged German-language praise-song to the Virgin Mary, the Marienleich, by the poet Heinrich von Meissen known as Frauenlob (c. 1260–1317), while placing the Marienleich in a context that was formative for its composition and medieval reception. Far from being a modern "marketing ploy," the title yields to a key medieval witness, the fourteenth-century manuscript Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Cod. Vind. 2701, which ends its copy of this work (with music) with the colophon "Expliciunt cantica canticorum vrowenlobiz."