In the late fourth and early fifth centuries, during a fifty-year stretch sometimes dubbed a Pauline renaissance of the western church, six different authors produced over four dozen commentaries in Latin on Paul's epistles. Among them was Jerome, who commented on four epistles (Galatians, Ephesians, Titus, Philemon) in 386 after recently having relocated to Bethlehem from Rome. His commentaries occupy a time-honored place in the centuries-long tradition of Latin-language commenting on Paul's writings. They also constitute his first foray into the systematic exposition of whole biblical books (and his only experiment with Pauline interpretation on this scale), and so they provide precious insight into his intellectual development at a critical stage of his early career before he would go on to become the most prolific biblical scholar of Late Antiquity. This monograph provides the first book-length treatment of Jerome's opus Paulinum in any language. Adopting a cross-disciplinary approach, Cain comprehensively analyzes the commentaries' most salient aspects-from the inner workings of Jerome's philological method and engagement with his Greek exegetical sources, to his recruitment of Paul as an anachronistic surrogate for his own theological and ascetic special interests. One of the over-arching concerns of this book is to explore and to answer, from multiple vantage points, a question that was absolutely fundamental to Jerome in his fourth-century context: what are the sophisticated mechanisms by which he legitimized himself as a Pauline commentator, not only on his own terms but also vis-à-vis contemporary western commentators?

In the late fourth and early fifth centuries, during a fifty-year stretch sometimes dubbed a Pauline 'renaissance' of the western church, six different authors produced over four dozen commentaries in Latin on Paul's epistles. Among them was Jerome, who commented on four epistles (Galatians, Ephesians, Titus, Philemon) in 386 after recently having relocated to Bethlehem from Rome. His commentaries occupy a time-honored place in the centuries-long tradition of Latin-language commenting on Paul's writings. Adopting a cross-disciplinary approach, Cain comprehensively analyzes the commentaries' most salient aspects - from the inner workings of Jerome's philological method and engagement with his Greek exegetical sources, to his recruitment of Paul as an anachronistic surrogate for his own theological and ascetic special interests.

In the late-second century, Tatian the Assyrian constructed a new Gospel by intricately harmonizing Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Tatian's work became known as the Diatessaron, since it was derived 'out of the four' eventually canonical Gospels. Though it circulated widely for centuries, the Diatessaron disappeared in antiquity. Nevertheless, numerous ancient and medieval harmonies survive in various languages. Some texts are altogether independent of the Diatessaron, while others are definitely related. Yet even Tatian's known descendants differ in large and small ways, so attempts at reconstruction have proven confounding. In this book James W. Barker forges a new path in Diatessaron studies. Covering the widest array of manuscript evidence to date, Tatian's Diatessaron reconstructs the compositional and editorial practices by which Tatian wrote his Gospel. By sorting every extant witnesses according to its narrative sequence, the macrostructure of Tatian's Gospel becomes clear. Despite many shared agreements, there remain significant divergences between eastern and western witnesses. This book argues that the eastern ones preserve Tatian's order, whereas the western texts descend from a fourth-century recension of the Diatessaron. Victor of Capua and his scribe used the recension to produce the Latin Codex Fuldensis in the sixth century. More controversially, Barker offers new evidence that late medieval texts such as the Middle Dutch Stuttgart harmony independently preserve traces of the western recension. This study uncovers the composition and reception history behind one of early Christianity's most elusive texts.

The self-emptying of Christ, proclaimed in the letter to the Philippians 2:7, remains a much-debated topic in modern theology and exegesis. This book brings the insights of Greek Christianity to the understanding of kenosis to illustrate that new dimensions of the topic open up when it is examined in the historical era of early Christianity.

This volume critically re-evaluates the received interpretation of the nature of light in the ancient sources. Isidoros C. Katsos contests the prevalent view in the history of optics according to which pre-modernity theorized light as subordinate to sight ('oculocentrism') by examining in depth the contrary textual evidence found in early Christian texts. It shows that, from Philo of Alexandria and Origen to Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, the Jewish-Christian commentary tradition on the hexaemeral literature (the biblical creation narrative) reflected deeply on the nature and physicality of light for the purposes of understanding the structure and purpose of material creation. Contemplation of nature allowed early Christian thinkers to conceptualize light as the explanatory principle of vision rather than subordinated to it. Contrary to the prevalent view, the hexaemeral literature necessitates a 'luminocentric' interpretation of the theory of light of Plato's Timaeus in its reception history in the context of late antique cosmology. Hexaemeral luminocentrism invites the reader of Scripture to grasp not only the sensible properties of light, but also their causal principle as the first manifestation of the divine Logos in creation. The hexaemeral metaphysics thus provides the missing ground of meaning of the early Christian language of light.

Essays illuminating a wide range of topics from Cistercian preachers and the "geography" of purgatory to royal and ecclesiastical justice and power. This volume continues the Society's commitment to historical and interdisciplinary research from the early and central Middle Ages and demonstrates its belief that the close interrogation of primary documents yields new insights into or important recalibrations of our understanding of the past. It begins by surveying the works of the Greek Fathers rendered into Latin in late antiquity, exploring their reception and deployment in England before the conquest. The twelfth century occupies a central place in this volume. Four papers offer close readings or re-readings of key authors or sources: one reconstructs William of Malmesbury's journeys in the mid-1130s; another offers a new reading of two of Aelred of Rievaulx's royal biographies; a third considers the influence of Henry of Marcy on Herbert of Clairvaux's Liber visionum et miraculorum Clarevallensium; and a fourth examines the Historia Gaufredi Ducis and its outsized impact on the history of the ritual of dubbing. Two papers address royal and ecclesiastical justice in mid-thirteenth-century France through meticulous work with archival sources: they respectively consider the case of Geoffroy de Milly and limits of sovereign authority and enquêtes as a technique of power. Further topics include the emerging "geography" of purgatory in the imagination of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the different dimensions of medieval institutional culture as seen in the intersection of earthly and angelic power in Angevin England (placed in dialogue with American medieval historiography); and the evolving historiographical treatment of men of the Church employed as trusted administrators by Italian communes. The volume concludes with two essays on significant moments in the history of American medieval studies: examinations of the publication history of Evelyn Faye Wilson's Stella Maris of John of Garland and of the life, scholarship and legacy of Bennett David Hill round out the volume.

In the centuries following his death, Jerome (c.347-420) was venerated as a saint and as one of the four Doctors of the Latin church. In his own lifetime, however, he was a severely marginalized figure whose intellectual and spiritual authority did not go unchallenged, at times even by those in his inner circle. His ascetic theology was rejected by the vast majority of Christian contemporaries, his Hebrew scholarship was called into question by the leading Biblical authorities of the day, and the reputation he cultivated as a pious monk was compromised by allegations of moral impropriety with some of his female disciples. In view of the extremely problematic nature of his profile, how did Jerome seek to bring credibility to himself and his various causes? In this book, the first of its kind in any language, Andrew Cain answers this crucial question through a systematic examination of Jerome's idealized self-presentation across the whole range of his extant epistolary corpus. Modern scholars overwhelmingly either access the letters as historical sources or appreciate their aesthetic properties. Cain offers a new approach and explores the largely neglected but nonetheless fundamental propagandistic dimension of the correspondence. In particular, he proposes theories about how, and above all why, Jerome used individual letters and letter-collections to bid for status as an expert on the Bible and ascetic spirituality.

Composed in 404, Jerome's Epitaph on Saint Paula (Epitaphium Sanctae Paulae) is an elaborate eulogy commemorating the life of Paula (347-404), a wealthy Christian widow from Rome who renounced her senatorial status and embraced an ascetic lifestyle and in 386 co-founded with Jerome a monastic complex in Bethlehem.

The Slavic Letters of St. Jerome is the first book-length study of the medieval legend that Church Father and biblical translator St. Jerome was a Slav who invented the Slavic (Glagolitic) alphabet and Roman Slavonic rite. Julia Verkholantsev locates the roots of this belief among the Latin clergy in Dalmatia in the 13th century and describes in fascinating detail how Slavic leaders subsequently appropriated it to further their own political agendas. The Slavic language, written in Jerome's alphabet and endorsed by his authority, gained the unique privilege in the Western Church of being the only language other than Latin, Greek, and Hebrew acceptable for use in the liturgy. Such privilege, confirmed repeatedly by the popes, resulted in the creation of narratives about the distinguished historical mission of the Slavs and became a possible means for bridging the divide between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches in the Slavic-speaking lands. In the fourteenth century the legend spread from Dalmatia to Bohemia and Poland, where Glagolitic monasteries were established to honor the Apostle of the Slavs Jerome and the rite and letters he created. The myth of Jerome's apostolate among the Slavs gained many supporters among the learned and spread far and wide, reaching Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and England. Grounded in extensive archival research, Verkholantsev examines the sources and trajectory of the legend of Jerome's Slavic fellowship within a wider context of European historical and theological thought. This unique volume will appeal to medievalists, Slavicists, scholars of religion, those interested in saints' cults, and specialists of philology.