The Letter Collections of Jerome of Stridon

The 123 genuine letters that constitute Jerome’s epistolary corpus showcase his literary ingenuity, and recent scholarship has established Jerome’s sophistication as a letter-writer and skillful exploitation of the epistolary medium for the purposes of self-presentation. Unlike some of his epistolographic peers, Jerome never planned to publish a large collection of his letters organized in multiple books. Rather, by the mid-point of his literary career, Jerome had released a selection of his letters in two discrete and unrelated collections, the Ad Marcellam epistularum liber and the Epistularum ad diversos liber. The chapter focuses on the latter in order to reconstruct its original contents, analyze its themes, and suggest the specific circumstances under which Jerome may have compiled and released it.