Thomas Hunt: Breath and Jerome’s literary production

Jerome disguised the true nature of his relationship to his patrons and to his sources so that he might present himself as exemplar and arbiter of orthodoxy. Recent scholarship has shown how his asceticism, heresiological writing, commentary, and translation all fed in to this wider project of authorial self-fashioning. Despite recent excellent work tracking the connections between Jerome’s asceticism and his literary production, there remains almost no extended treatment of the way that Jerome conceptualised breathing in his work. This gap in scholarship is important. Breath was a fundamental component in speech and was recognised as such in the linguistic theories of late antiquity. At the same time, breath had a particular function in late antique biological and medical science. In late antiquity, then, attending to the breath was key to the production of language and to understanding human bodies in the world. Drawing on theories of language and embodied affect from late antiquity and from modernity, this paper sketches out a late antique culture of breath and then positions Jerome within it. It argues that breath offers a useful site from which to analyse Jerome’s ascetic literary production.