The Letters of Jerome: Asceticism, Biblical Exegesis, and the Construction of Christian Authority in Late Antiquity (review)

This lively, readable, yet intensely erudite book is a welcome addition to a reappraisal of Jerome underway since the early 1990s. Scholarship on this complex figure long languished under the weight of his medieval and early modern reception as a saint and doctor of the church. Many interpreters, as a result, felt compelled either to affirm or to attack Jerome's personal and scholarly integrity—and by implication his place in the tradition. More recent literature transcends this dichotomy by emphasizing, as Cain does here, the specific contexts in which Jerome wrote: his relative marginality during his lifetime, the controversial status of many of his distinctive positions and scholarly projects, especially asceticism and Hebrew study, and the resulting centrality of literary self-presentation to his quest for patronage, scholarly independence, and a position of cultural authority.

Cain develops this historicizing approach to Jerome by integrating it with two other key trends in classics and late antique studies. Since the 1990s, the literariness of ancient letters and letter-collections—shaped by elite social dynamics, rhetorical training, and the special conventions and contexts of epistolography—has come to the fore. Pioneering studies on the letters of Cicero and Pliny have spawned an entire literature and studies of late antique letters also have proliferated. It is surprising, given the prominence of Jerome's letter collection, both in ancient epistolography and within his own oeuvre, that only in 2009 did a study of a selection of Jerome's letters along similar lines finally appear. Cain's work is thus not only welcome, but also overdue.

Simultaneously, accounts of the origins and development of asceticism have been significantly revised. Familiar saints no longer monopolize the scene, but make way for less well-known ascetic founders, including women and heretics. More clearly recognized, too, is persistent opposition to asceticism among both clergy and laity. Cain productively places Jerome's correspondence, especially his Roman letters, in the context of this new appreciation of how controversial ascetic lifestyles remained in late fourth-century Italy and beyond.

Drawing on all three of these bodies of scholarship, Cain finds new contexts for many of Jerome's individual letters, and—perhaps most originally—for the collections in which Jerome took care to disseminate certain groups of letters during his lifetime. The book is organized into an introduction, six chapters, a brief conclusion, and three valuable appendices. Although the chapters take up elements of Jerome's letter-collection in roughly chronological order, the book is unified not by narrative but by argument. One of the great strengths of the book (which also makes it difficult to summarize) is its recognition of how closely interconnected were varied polemics in which Jerome was constantly engaged. The letters discussed include examples from all periods of Jerome's career, but the overwhelming focus is on the three years he spent at Rome from 382 to 385. Each chapter provides richly specific commentary on a particular group of letters; together, they drive home a single interpretation of Jerome as a letter-writer.

As Cain portrays him, Jerome was a highly educated striver of obscure provincial origins, who moved in circles dominated by Roman senatorial families. He advocated a style of asceticism—popular in the East for a generation—whose emergence in the West aroused great controversy. His career in the church was fraught with discord, marked by repeated exiles and excommunications. To carve out any authority for himself in the face of these challenges, Jerome had to craft a literary self-presentation that made virtues of his many controversial positions: his radical asceticism (Chapter One, "The Voice of One Calling in the Desert"), his criticisms of the clergy and competing claims as a spiritual advisor (Chapter Five, "The Embattled Ascetic Sage"), and his scholarly innovations, such as the re-translation of the gospels and the study of the Old...