ABSTRACT
That is not the line that will be pursued here. Even at this late stage, the idea of taking “Jerome” for granted is still worth resisting. When or where was “Jerome” or “Jerome of Stridon” ever a given quantity? And of what? By what absolute standard shall we ever assess the fidelity or adequacy of one or another species of latercoming Jeronimianism? Even to pose such questions is to expose the weakness of the ordinary “receptionist” metaphor, which assumes something to have been given in the first place. Jerome, we may be sure, could never be more a given than anyone else: mind, body, soul, life, works, thoughts, feelings, foibles. “Jerome” is a proper name; we know how proper names work among living human beings, and that none of them properly designates anything. Yet our handbooks, prosopographies, lexika, claves, corpora, and other instruments conspire to insinuate the contrary when it comes to historical personages. “Personage”—the word itself gives the game away. It evidently derives from medieval Latin personagium, meaning “effigy.” Instead of “the reception of Jerome,” we may as well say “Jerome in effigy,” or we had better say that. The immediate effect of the substitution is to install a figure of production in place of a theme of reception. The disparaging sense of “effigy” is modern. The classical Latin word effigies denoted an artistic representation: a copy, image, statue, or portrait. If we take anything for granted, it should perhaps be that the object of our studies is a work of art without original in nature. Hieronymus fit, non nascitur. The real history of Jerome, as of any historical person or personage, is one of continuous production-a history that begins, we have been reminded several times already, with Jerome the self-producer.4
