Christa Gray: Whose story? Approaching sources and narrators in Jerome's Lives of desert saints

There is currently an emerging interest among scholars in applying sophisticated literary methods to hagiographical writings in order to gain a deeper understanding of the texts and their cultural role. Among these approaches is the use of narratology. I propose to investigate the narrator of Jerome's three Lives, the Vitae Pauli, Malchi, and Hilarionis, through an analysis of the narrator's attitudes and emotions, both those expressed in the narrator's own voice and those implicit in the narrative structures of the texts. I shall also consider the sources from which the narrator claims to have the information recounted in the text, and outlines the ways in which those sources may have been adapted.
In the course of such an analysis it becomes clear that the narrating voices are far from stable and reliable, and that they vary dramatically across the three Lives. Whereas large parts of the Vitae Pauli and Malchi are focalised through the linear experience of a prominent protagonist, Antony and Malchus respectively, the Vita Hilarionis comes closest to a biography in the Plutarchan tradition. The narrator wants to give a full and objective picture of the subject's life. The structure varies between chronological progression and episodic anecdotes which are probably sourced in the main from Hilarion's disciples. This complexity makes it harder to draw a-priori conclusions about the narrator; but here a comparison with the other two Lives allows readers to contextualise individual phrases and statements with regard to their ideological and affective connotations.

Thomas Hunt: Razored passages from St Jerome: the logic of circumcision in On Famous Men

Michael Donaghy's poem ‘City of God' (1993) weaves together the poet's Catholic patrimony and the topography of the Bronx. The events of the poem are catalysed by a collection of ‘razored passages from St Augustine' discovered in the bedroom of a failed seminarian after his nervous breakdown. Stalking the broken priest through the bankrupt city, Donaghy explores the ruinous power of reading. The figure of Augustine has long been used to investigate the cultural inheritance of Christianity as well as to frame the Late Antique in general (Marrou; Brown). Recent discussion has also highlighted the importance of Augustine's contemporary, Jerome of Stridon, in this process of reception and scholarship (e.g. Cain; Chin; Duval; Fürst; Vessey). Building on Donaghy's poem and this scholarship on Jerome, this paper argues that the index of Christian culture that Jerome outlines in On Famous Men (393) bears a significant debt to Origen's theology of history, not least the Homilies on Luke which Jerome translated in 392. The paper focuses on those writers or books which Jerome self-consciously excises from On Famous Men and argues that these absences should be read alongside the discussion of signification, dereliction and circumcision in Origen's fifth homily on Luke. Given the recent importance attached to Jerome in shaping the Christian culture that was to be received by medieval and modern scholars of Patristics, this debt to Origen's supersessionist theology needs to be unpacked. Razored passages can cut - as Donaghy tells us - and Jerome's inheritance, like Augustine's, is double-edged.

Silvia Georgieva: Domina, filia, conserva, germana: The Identity of the Correspondent in Jerome's letters to Roman Women

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.

Christine McCann: “The Power of the Living Voice: St. Jerome, Nepotian, and the Creation of Affective Bonds”

St. Jerome’s letters are our main source of evidence for how he practiced spiritual mentoring.  The interpersonal dynamics between mentor and disciple were important, even essential, to fostering spiritual growth.  Jerome commented a number of times about the limitations of the written word as opposed to the human voice.  How could one overcome the obstacles of distance and the shortcomings of written communication to foster a sense of personal connection with one’s spiritual disciples?   Jerome’s letters show that persons separated by long distances might still come to have strong emotional ties.  This paper will focus on Jerome’s letter exchange with the young cleric Nepotian, nephew of Jerome’s friend Heliodorus, as an example of a relationship fostered by such techniques. Using ancient epistolary theory as well as insights from Sarah McNamer’s work on medieval affective meditation, and Carol Harrison’s book,The Art of Listening, this paper will show how both Jerome’s techniques of letter composition and Nepotian’s techniques of reading served to create, or at least to encourage, the development of love and affection between mentor and disciple.  These methods fostered a dynamic of reciprocity between mentor and disciple, as both sought to grow in the love of God and neighbor.