Jerome's Works Research Articles

The Shifting Roles of Wealth and Poverty in Jerome's Vision of Asceticism and the Call to Perfection, as Reflected in a Selection of His Works

ABSTRACTThis study considers the place of financial renunciation, voluntary poverty and almsgiving in Jerome's ascetic vision, and reveals a delicate balancing act in his advice to wealthy Christians contained in a selection of his letters and treatises. I will investigate the practical realisation of his vision by Jerome and his followers within the social, political and legal context of the late fourth and early fifth centuries CE. Scriptural injunctions mainly informed early Christians’ understanding of wealth and poverty. I interrogate Jerome's response to the teachings of Jesus in connection with care for the poor: Who was to benefit from almsgiving—the donor or the recipient? Was there a self-interested dimension in financial renunciation and almsgiving? Was Jerome consistent in his advice to those who embraced financial asceticism? The dominical command to perfection was the cornerstone of Jerome's ascetic exhortations. Special attention will be given to Jesus Christ's advice to the rich young man (Matt. 19:16–30, with parallels in Mark 10:17–31 and Luke 18:18–30). Finn and Dunn, respectively, have investigated Jerome's references to this passage. However, Jerome's interpretation of this dominical command and the “call to perfection” deserves attention. What did Jerome consider to be “the attainment of perfection,” was he consistent in his advice, and were there any underlying motivations in his encouragement of dispossession by wealthy Christian ascetics? This article seeks to answer these questions through a study of a selection of Jerome's works, addressed to different persons according to varying rhetorical strategies and with different purposes in mind.

‘If You Wish to be My Mother, Take Care to Please Christ’: The Posthumous Speech of Blesilla in Jerome's Letter 39

ABSTRACTJerome's consolation to Paula on the death of her daughter Blesilla (letter 39) is the only one of his consolatory letters in which the letter's recipient is directly apostrophized by the deceased. This article sets the posthumous speech of Blesilla in the context of comparable features from Jerome's other consolatory letters, and demonstrates that it is one of the textual strategies by which Jerome seeks to achieve the letter's underlying purpose: to persuade Paula to moderate her public grief before it damages the reputation of Jerome's ascetic ideology. It explores how Blesilla's speech appeals to the emotional and affective qualities of Paula's maternal identity, and implies the susceptibility of the dead to the actions of the living—an idea with contemporary parallels in Jerome's works and elsewhere. It also argues that its secondary function is to emphasize Jerome's own role in providing access to the dead Blesilla and shaping her posthumous memory.

Questione di modelli : Petrarca, Gerolamo e lo Hieronymianus di Giovanni d'Andrea

Two Petrarch's letters (Familiares IV 15 and 16) are commonly taken into account for their autobiographical and apologetic aspects. The present article places them into the debate about the limits and characteristics of the academic knowledge (represented by the great jurist Giovanni d'Andrea) and its relationships with the new humanistic culture, with its myths and its models. Petrarch's discussion and comparison between St Jerome and St Augustine has to be considered in this context: the two Fathers stand for two well-defined and basically opposite ideas of culture. In its Hieronymianus (BHL 3876), a multipurpose work, which is not only a hagiography or a florilegium, Giovanni d'Andrea shapes an image of St Jerome's holiness and lays down methods and areas of its use for different purposes, from popular devotion to theology and to juridical culture. Attention is focused on the fourth section of the Hieronymianus, which has a particular importance in the textual history of Jerome's work.

A Translation of Jerome's "Chronicon" with Historical Commentary

This translation and commentary makes Jerome's Chronicle available in English, and its selective notes aim to clarify Jerome's often terse references to persons, events and places in the 4th century A.D. The extensive bibliography, of both ancient and modern works, provides guidance for Jerome's own sources. It also serves to introduce the reader to many modern works that cover the early chronicle tradition as well as the historical period addressed by Jerome's work, because Jerome's Chronicle is concerned largely with imperial Roman history as well as ecclesiastical history.

L'érotisme spirituel dans La Chartreuse de Parme : Fabrice et saint Jérôme

Spiritual eroticism in the charterhouse of Parma : Fabrice and Saint Jérome. When Fabrice sends Clelia's uncle a fine edition of Saint Jerome's Works (his anotations have ned the chaplain 's copy) she asks to compare the copies, and reads Fabrice's love in his pious glosses. However, Saint Jerome is in himself important to the novel.

Thomas Gascoigne and Robert Grosseteste: Historical and Critical Notes

There of the may University be more of than Oxford, one reason Thomas why Gascoigne, that scholarly had a Chancellor particular of the University of Oxford, Thomas Gascoigne, had a particular devotion for his predecessor Robert Grosseteste1 . Beryl Smalley suggested that it was St. Jerome who linked both Chancellors together over the gap of two centuries.2 As a matter of fact, Gascoigne' s program for the University in the mid-fifteenth century was a patristic revival which proposed an effective and authentic reform of the clergy. It was to bring them to a more learned and less scholastic, more biblical and less financial involvement in their ministry, particularly in preaching. It seemed to him that the combination of scholarship and spiritual interpretation of the Bible found in Jerome's works, was the ideal that ought to be imitated. In his day Gascoigne could not find anyone who came so close to Jerome's spirit as Grosseteste. Odd to say, it was precisely the unscholastic strain of Grosseteste's exegetical writings, which to his contemporaries appeared obsolete and archaic, that gained him the grateful sympathy of Gascoigne. These general and correct statements may be further illustrated by various circumstances and by referring to the background. According to his own words Gascoigne started collecting materials for his principal work, the Dictionarium theologicum , in 14343. That same year he had

Greek and Hebrew Words in Jerome's Commentary on St. Matthew's Gospel

Readers of St. Jerome's works are familiar with the fact that he often quotes Greek and Hebrew words in the course of these, sometimes depending on his master Origen, sometimes depending on his personal knowledge of both languages, which was considerable. In the autographs of these works it was his custom to place a line over the top of such words, as a sign that they were foreign. Really old manuscripts of Jerome's works, apart from Vulgate MSS., are now rare. Such as were known to Traube are listed in his Hieronymi Chronicorum codicis Floriacensis fragmenta Leidensia, Parisina, Vaticana phototypice edita (Lugd. Bat.1902). But good early minuscule MSS. of his works in many cases preserve these horizontal lines, and record the Greek and Hebrew words with considerable accuracy. As time goes on, the lines tend to disappear, and Latin transliterations, with or without the Greek, become more and more common. Most of the editions of Jerome are defective in two respects among others: they were not based on the oldest and best manuscripts, and the editors did not know very much Greek. It is hoped that the details furnished below will have some interest for students of Greek writing in the latter part of the fourth century.

Jerome's Work on the psalter

Jerome's Work on the psalter