The paper examines St. Jerome's letters to his Christian friends from
the circle of Marcella in Rome. The idea of the Church Father regarding
the identity and the image of a woman as a correspondent and of himself
as an author is clearly displayed in these texts: both in the rhetoric
of the epistolary genre and the textual fabric of the letters. The forms
of address towards the collocutor, borrowed from the social Roman
family relationship dictionary, leave its pagan dimensions. They raise
up into the religious field creating a new idea about family and
society, based on spiritual kinship, bond by ties stronger and deeper
than those of the regular family ties and epistolary friendship of the
Roman letter writers.
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