Maik Patzelt: Jerome, the charming networker – a thirdspace approach to Jerome’s letters

Since network positions as well as the performances within define somebody’s identity, Jerome laid hand on exactly these factors in order to fashion an authorial role – the role of a patron of senatorial women, most of all widows. As his correspondence with senatorial women suggests, it was his genius in exegetical affairs that makes him the centre of the womens’ attention.The proposed approach seeks to contest Jerome’s self-representation. A close reading of some exemplary letters (22; 54; 130) through the lens of network-theoretical and post-colonial perspectives of identity (H. Bhabha) allows relocating Jerome’s position within the female network as it allows reconsidering the corresponding identity of both Jerome and these aristocrat women. As such an approach will unveil, Jerome was less a unique leader but one of many clerics that competed for the benevolence and protection of the aristocrat women, who maintained their own, powerful networks with which they competed with men. Given the rather subsidiary role of Jerome and the evident powerful position of women, Jerome used his letters to create a thirdspace,which ‘enables other positions to emerge […], sets up new structures of authority’ (Bhabha 1990, 211). Jerome, strictly speaking, interprets the social reality through imagined representations and networks in order to contest and invert this reality, in which women seemed to be much more powerful than commonly expected.