ABSTRACT
Mutatis mutandis, scholars of Jerome received their charter from Marrou when he summoned scholars of Augustine "to appeal constantly from Augustinianism, from all Augustinianisms, to Saint Augustine". Some such historicist credo, shorn of the presumption of sanctity, undergirds our continuing attempts to decipher the texts, personalities, actions, and opinions of late fourth- and early fifth-century Roman Christian writers. In constant tension with this monumental imaginary, in Jerome's writing in the Latin tradition, is the contrasting figure of artistic or poetic expression as a mode of bodily performance akin to song, dance or the drama. In restoring the horizon of Christian "letters" in the time of Jerome, Erasmus hoped most particularly to recover a lost text and understanding of the Latin Bible, beginning with the New Testament. The extant "monuments" of Christian writers, as Jerome had defined them in the preface to De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis, were the works of men "who had published something worthy of memory concerning the holy scriptures".
