This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. Jerome's oeuvre is huge; it comprises translations and commentaries of many books of the Christian Bible, a universal history, a history of Christian literature, biographies of monks, many treatises, and more than letters addressed to people from the educated upper classes of the late Roman West. This article investigates what role Roman law played in Jerome's writings, what he knew about it, and how he evaluated it.
It also looks at his views on late Roman jurisdiction and collects the evidence he provides for petitions to the emperor and for imperial rescripts. The main section analyzes Jerome's ideas about imperial legislation, his knowledge of individual laws, and the way he presented them. On this basis, it is argued that Jerome's writings bear impressive witness to the importance of Roman law for both the social practice and the mindset of the provincial and local elites in the late Roman empire.
Jerome's fame rests on his achievements as a translator and exegete of biblical texts. Through his translations of Origen's works, Jerome helped to ensure that the thought of the Greek theologian was never forgotten in the West, despite the fact that he had been accused of heresy and was eventually condemned. Through his translation of the Chronicle of Eusebius of Caesarea, he invented a new genre of Latin literature; 2 with his book on ecclesiastical authors, he transferred the genre of literary history to the Christian sphere.
All of this constitutes a huge oeuvre that even patristics scholars can hardly keep track of. This article deals with an aspect of Jerome's life and writings that was of secondary importance, at best, to him: I will investigate the role Roman law plays in his writings with the aim of demonstrating that he had a basic knowledge of Roman private law and legal history, and that he also presupposed such knowledge among his intended audience.
This corpus of texts thus provides valuable evidence for the legal culture of Roman elites in the provinces. In addition, I will call Jerome up as a witness to the jurisdiction of governors and bishops. In a third step, I will analyze his view of imperial legislation and seek out the traces left by imperial rescripts and constitutions in his writings, some of which have hardly been noticed as yet. The analysis of these texts will throw light on the way imperial laws were perceived in the provinces and on how they were used by interested parties for their own, personal and polemical purposes.
