The Puritans were not prudes, but the caricature has some basis in fact. Again the Song of Songs provides a neat barometer. Scheper juxtaposes a medieval monk’s interpretation of the “breasts” of the Song with that of two Protestant interpreters. The results are fascinating:
“the Cistercian monk Gilbert of Hoilandia does in explicating the praise of the bride’s breasts: ‘Those breasts are beautiful which rise up a little and swell moderately, neither too elevated, nor, indeed, level with the rest of the chest. They are as if repressed but not depressed, softly restrained, but not flapping loosely.’ In contrast, the Protestant Durham says that ‘our Carnalness makes it hazardous and unsafe, to descend in the Explication of these Similitudes,’ and the Puritan Collinges says that ‘the very uncouthness of the same expressions, is an argument, that it is no meer Woman here intended.”
This yields the interesting hermeneutical conclusion that, at times, Protestants were more allegorical than medieval Catholics.
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