My dissertation explores how Carolingian scholars interpreted one particularly difficult book of the Bible, the Song of Songs, using its vivid erotic poetry as an allegory to understand their own place and function within society. The Song of Songs is a dialogue between two main characters, implicitly identified as the Bride and Bridegroom, who celebrate their love using an intensely passionate sequence of botanical and agricultural metaphors. Drawing on the work of Bede and an earlier, fragmentary commentary of Gregory the Great, Carolingian writers produced an unprecedented number of commentaries on the Song of Songs, as well as other works inspired by its imagery. These include some of the most prominent and prolific intellectuals of the Carolingian world: Alcuin, Theodulf, Haimo of Auxerre, Angelomus of Luxeuil, Paschasius Radbertus, Agobard of Lyons, and Hincmar of Rheims. For these scholars, the beauty of the Bride represented the beauty of their church, both outside of time and in their own day. Taking advantage of the ambiguities of the biblical text, Carolingian exegetes transmuted the erotic imagery of the Song of Songs into a series of metaphors by which they understood their own place in the church, how they ought to act, and the kinds of pastoral activities in which they should participate. My work demonstrates how Carolingian monks and clergy used the Song of Songs to articulate the goals and ideals of an increasingly self-conscious and ambitious clerical class. On the one hand, they understood images from the Song, such as the Bride working in her vineyard or pasturing her flocks, to authorize their own activities in evangelization, pastoral care, and policy making; on the other, to understand the allegorical interpretation of this difficult biblical text was itself a class marker of an intellectual elite. In using the language of the Song of Songs to describe themselves and to form a common identity within the church, Carolingian elites also used that language to label and characterize the behavior of those they perceived to be tearing the church apart from within. Imagery from the Song of Songs would go on to play an important role in the history of heresy in the high and later Middle Ages; my dissertation explores the roots of such language in the Carolingian era, as the doctors sought to portray themselves as the ultimate arbiters of orthodoxy. And finally, I examine how the Song of Songs formed one very important aspect of of an ongoing conversation between church and crown, providing Carolingian monks and clergy with a plethora of models to advise, to inspire, and occasionally to rebuke their sovereigns.