Christa Gray: Saints and lovers: the protagonist's close relationships in Jerome's Vitae Sanctorum

One major difference between Athanasius' Life of Antony and Jerome's three Vitae Sanctorum is that Antony is generally depicted as a solitary hero, whereas Jerome's protagonists all have close emotional relationships with other characters (Paul and Antony in the Life of Paul; Malchus and the unnamed woman in the Captive Monk; Hilarion and Antony, followed by Hilarion and Hesychius, in the Life of Hilarion). These relationships have been pointed out and analysed by Virginia Burrus in an article which now forms the first chapter of her Sex Lives of Saints (first published 2004). Building on Burrus' stimulating observations, I propose to investigate this pattern further in terms of the Lives' literary relationships with existing texts. Comparison with biblical and 'secular' models suggests that Jerome styles these relationships on a variety of models (see e.g. the recent article by Susan L. Haskins and Jacobus B Kritzinger, "Naming the nameless woman of Jerome's Vita Malchi", HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies 74: 3 (2018)), and that these models give a further indication of the author's indebtedness to a variety of cultural contexts, besides his stylistic and linguistic dependencies.