Jerome of Stridon about Influential Nuns in the Christian Church

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the influence of women-ascetics as described by Jerome of Strydon, whose epistolary heritage together contains the greatest number of letters addressed to women. It is established that the main means of influence are financial resources, the use of which allows the nuns — Fabiola, Paula, Lea — to realize their power in various aspects. The author concludes that in addition to maintaining the material well-being of the monastic communities as a whole, the influence of individual nuns is manifested in their ability to influence the gender composition of monasticism: by creating male and female monasteries in the Holy Land, women ensured that their sisters in faith had access to Christian shrines on an equal footing with men. The work also points out that by patronizing the monasteries, the centers of intellectual activity, and individual church writers, nuns had some influence on theological life. In addition, the author emphasizes that in founding a monastery a woman vested some authority in herself, allowing her to regulate both the relationships within the community and the external interactions.