A nun was called the "bride of Christ" because her vocation to the religious life was regarded as a covenant as binding as that of marriage. In the New Testament Christ is a bridegroom and the Church is his bride: see Mark 2:19 and John 3:29; his bride must be like him--that is, free of blemish (2 Corinthians 11:2). Ingratitude and sin are, in this figure of speech, "adultery." This imagery is prominent in the Book of Revelations, in which the bride wears dazzling white that contrasts to the scarlet worn by the whore of Babylon. For additional references, see the New Catholic Encyclopedia.
In medieval preaching, marriage served as a common figure of speech for the Christian's devotion to Christ. Every soul was either an adulteress with the Devil or the bride of Christ, wrote Thomas Brinton (fourteenth century); the soul was also married to the body, a bishop was said to be married to his diocese, and a priest was the "husband" of his flock. Eventually secular leaders such as kings and princes were said to be wed to their people.
The idea of a nun as a bride seems contradictory, of course, since nuns retained their virginity. But Henry Ansgar Kelly has shown that in the Middle Ages "virginal marriage" was considered even truer and holier than a consumated marriage because a marriage without sexual union more closely approximated the union of the soul and Christ. See Kelly's book, Love and Marriage in the Age of Chaucer.(Cornell UP, 1975).
The Middle English poem known as "Pearl" is a famous text that uses this figure of speech, applying it to a child. You can check recent bibliography on feminist readings of this work for references to its use of virginity, childhood, and bride-groom analogies.
This figure of speech can be examined in two ways: first, as a way of using the feminine to structure social roles (bride is subordinate to groom, woman to man, state to prince, body to soul, etc.); another is as a way of using the marriage contract figuratively.
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