Jerome's biblical scholarship, ascetic Christianity and friendships with pious Roman women were subject to scrutiny and criticism by contemporaries; nor has posterity judged him generously. In this book Cain goes beyond some of the standard psycho-biographical readings of Jerome's work, and instead explores how Jerome carefully constructed a scholarly and spiritual image for himself through his correspondence. He examines the shape and intent of individual letters of Jerome, as well as of the likely rationale behind the authorial issue of collections of letters. Four out of six chapters deal with Jerome's Roman sojourn and the remaining two examine his Bethlehem years; this deliberate valuation of the relative importance of these periods to Jerome's formation as a Christian scholar, exegete and letter-writer is sensible. In chapter i Cain identifies anew the contents of a collection Jerome is known to have made of his letters to various people, and dates the production of this liber to just after his arrival in Rome. He suggests that Jerome, through this collection, introduced himself as a successful and orthodox desert ascetic and as a learned and assiduous correspondent. This idealised self-image was designed to ingratiate Jerome with a range of potential patrons including Marcella and her circle. Chapter ii examines Jerome's canny circulation of his exegetical correspondence with pope Damasus, underlining Damasus' reliance on Jerome, legitimising Jerome's deployment of a novel sort of (especially Hebrew) philological and textual expertise, and promoting his scholarship over that of traditionalist exegetes such as Ambrosiaster. Jerome's correspondence with Marcella is explored in chapter iii as a sustained justification and memento of his spiritual and scholarly leadership of a coterie of Roman women, circulated in retrospective justification after his expulsion from Rome in 385. In chapter iv Cain explains this expulsion in novel terms as the result not of clerical efforts to unseat him, but of machinations by the suspicious family of Paula, one of the women under Jerome's care. Chapters v and vi address Jerome's correspondence from Bethlehem, treating respectively his letters on spiritual advice and those on biblical exegesis. In three appendices Cain presents a useful new classification system for Jerome's extant letters based on their rhetorical content; an inventory of known lost letters; and a survey of the manuscript tradition of the letters. The Jerome who emerges from this book is a more sympathetic (and less shrill) scholar and ecclesiastical operator than that of traditional scholarship. Cain's meticulous and sensitive analysis of the context for and dynamic of Jerome's letters builds on the scholarship of Conybeare and Trout on Paulinus of Nola's epistolography, and his exploration of some of the more obscure corners of Jerome's correspondence is particularly welcome.