Saint Jerome and the History of Sex

Abstract

"Saint Jerome and the History of Sex." Saint Jerome's Against Jovinian is more an attack on a particular kind of marriage-one which, as Jerome sees it, disempowers women by emphasizing heterosexual passion and childbearing-than it is an attack on women, and it should be viewed within the framework of the social history of the family rather than in that of the moral and psychological history of sex. Seen from this point of view, Against Jovinian tends to empower women within the marriage relationship as Jerome found it in late antiquity. This article looks at Roman antimatrimonial traditions and at what they may tell us about the family and about Saint Jerome; and it looks also at the subsequent history of Against Jovinian, especially in the early Renaissance, with the intent to make it less misogynist than it may appear.