The Letters of Jerome

Asceticism, Biblical Exegesis, and the Construction of Christian Authority in Late Antiquity

Andrew Cain

Oxford Early Christian Studies

The first book length study of its kind on Jerome's letters
This study intersects with two topics that are presently "hot topics" in scholarship on the ancient world, self-presentation through literary texts and the mechanics of how authority was acquired and negotiated in the early church
Primary sources in Latin and Greek are provided in the footnotes to accompany their translation in the main text
The author's methodology is interdisciplinary and draws on a range of literary, historical, legal, and religious sources.
Contains a comprehensive bibliography of scholarship on Jerome over the past 100 years and of more recent scholarship on manufactured authority more broadly in the Latin and Greek patristic traditions.

The Letters of Jerome

Asceticism, Biblical Exegesis, and the Construction of Christian Authority in Late Antiquity

Andrew Cain

Oxford Early Christian Studies

Description

In the centuries following his death, Jerome (c.347-420) was venerated as a saint and as one of the four Doctors of the Latin church. In his own lifetime, however, he was a severely marginalized figure whose intellectual and spiritual authority did not go unchallenged, at times not even by those in his inner circle. His ascetic theology was rejected by the vast majority of Christian contemporaries, his Hebrew scholarship was called into question by the leading Biblical authorities of the day, and the reputation he cultivated as a pious monk was compromised by allegations of moral impropriety with some of his female disciples.

In view of the extremely problematic nature of his profile, how did Jerome seek to bring credibility to himself and his various causes? In this book, the first of its kind in any language, Andrew Cain answers this crucial question through a systematic examination of Jerome's idealized self-presentation across the whole range of his extant epistolary corpus. Modern scholars overwhelmingly either access the letters as historical sources or appreciate their aesthetic properties. Cain offers a new approach and explores the largely neglected but nonetheless fundamental propagandistic dimension of the correspondence. In particular, he proposes theories about how, and above all why, Jerome used individual letters and letter-collections to bid for status as an expert on the Bible and ascetic spirituality.

The Letters of Jerome

Asceticism, Biblical Exegesis, and the Construction of Christian Authority in Late Antiquity

Andrew Cain

Oxford Early Christian Studies

Introduction
1. 'The Voice of One Calling in the Desert'
2. A Pope and His Scholar
3. Claiming Marcella
4. Expulsion from Rome
5. The Embattled Ascetic Sage
6. The Exegetical Letters
Conclusion
Appendices
I. Classifying the Letters: A New Taxonomy
II. Lost Letters of Jerome
III. The Manuscript Tradition