Epistolography is in vogue, and this engagingly written book shares in the revisionist spirit of recent scholarship on ancient letters. Andrew Cain's principal interest lies not in Jerome's correspondence as historical or biographical source-material or in its more straightforwardly literary characteristics but in its ‘propagandistic’ function: how the letters serve to create authority for Jerome as an ascetic expert and Biblical scholar in the (still) competitive world of Christian Late Antiquity. The approach is deliberately selective. Four of the six chapters focus on Jerome's second stay in Rome (a.d. 382–385), a period during which the foundations of his authority were laid and which may be regarded (as C. does) as decisive for his future career; the remaining two consider letters written later from Bethlehem. Chs 1 and 3 take as their starting-point Jerome's entry on himself in De viris illustribus, which lists among his literary output two letter-collections, the Epistularum ad diversos liber and the Ad Marcellam epistularum liber. In ch. 1, C. attempts to identify the contents of the former, concluding that it embraced what modern editions present as Epp. 2–13 and 15–17, and argues that these texts, written just before and during Jerome's ‘desert’ years, were released as a compilation soon after his arrival in Rome in order to introduce him to Roman readers and demonstrate his ascetic credentials. Ch. 3 performs a similar task for the Ad Marcellam collection, which was put together, in C.'s judgement, shortly before Jerome's hasty departure for the East in a.d. 385, as a defence of ‘the legacy of ascetic teaching and biblical scholarship he had forged for himself in Rome’ (90) and as ‘an abiding textualized presence’ in the city (92); the chapter (though perhaps not strong in all respects) thus adds something to Mark Vessey's seminal reading of Jerome-as-Origen in the Marcellan letters (Studia patristica 28 (1993), 135–45). Important here is C.'s use of codicological evidence in seeking to establish the contents (and hence character and function) of these ancient letter-collections, and this points a way forward: there is undoubtedly much to be learned from further investigation of the manuscript tradition of the letters. Ch. 2 examines the Roman correspondence with Damasus (Epp. 19–21, 35–6), arguing that it was initially circulated by Jerome in Rome to indicate his standing as an interpreter of Scripture and more specifically to give authority to his insistence on the importance of Hebrew in Biblical scholarship. In ch. 4, C. reconsiders the context and causes of Jerome's subsequent expulsion from the city, proposing that the main drive came not from within the clergy but from the aristocratic family of his close associate Paula; in the introduction (10), C. claims that he will ‘adduce new evidence’ in support of this, but in fact nothing so solid is presented in the discussion, and — while the idea itself is entirely plausible — we are left with speculation only. Chs 5 and 6 continue the general theme of Jerome's self-presentation and establishment of authority through textual means by examining a number of letters of spiritual advice (Epp. 52, 125, 130) and exegesis (Epp. 64, 78, 120–1), nearly all interpreted with close reference to specific contexts.

Overall C. makes a good case, with many interesting observations along the way, and the book, with its extensive bibliography and helpful indexes, will assuredly become a central reference-point for further work on Jerome. At the same time, certain limitations need to be recognized. In the first place, there is always a danger with studies concerned to take a particular line on an ancient figure that other important dimensions vanish from sight. In his conclusion, C. is careful to note that his stress on Jerome's enhancement of his own authority through judicious use of social connections (which was part of his strategy) is not ‘meant to play down the sincerity of [his] passionate religiosity or to morph him … into a caricature of careerist excess’ (200), but the Jerome that has already emerged in the course of the book is nothing if not a calculating and self-focused figure. In building up this image, C. makes a great deal of his subject's (lack of) inherited social position: he is a ‘provincial upstart’ (8), an ‘obscure provincial’ (68) from a ‘rural backwater’ (33; cf. 109), a ‘novus homo from Stridon’ (121), in short, ‘a provincial parvenu of obscure lineage from a virtually unknown town’ (199). This emphasis serves C.'s argument, but it needs to be borne in mind that the ‘upstart’ in question was educated at Donatus' school and was already in the early 370s a friend of the very well connected and influential Evagrius of Antioch — not, then, as ‘obscure’ as all that. This is perhaps symptomatic of a wider tendency (not uncharacteristic of Jerome himself) towards overstatement. Does the passage quoted from Ep. 130.19 really amount to ‘a bald assertion of the supremacy of [Jerome's] own writings’ (162; cf. 165)? Certainly it is hardly fair to read the preface to Ep. 120 as a ‘condemnation of secular learning’ (187). At times the rhetoric of C.'s own argument ensnares him: ‘In scripting Algasia [in Ep. 121] as a modern-day queen of Sheba, Jerome casts himself by implication as a modern-day Solomon’ (192–3); but in the passage in question Jerome explicitly rejects such an identification. More broadly, C.'s readings of specific texts sometimes lapse into a positivism surprising in a study so concerned with (and adept at) reading between the lines: the Marcella who appears in the exegetical letters addressed to her is first represented as Jerome's own construct (‘sculpt[ed] … into his alter ego’, 83) but within two sentences described, on the basis of the same material, as ‘genuinely interested in’ (84) the sort of Biblical-textual issues with which these letters are concerned. Greater familiarity with, or use of, recent work on (ancient and modern) epistolography might have helped, and also provided a broader context for the discussion; the interesting collection edited by Morello and Morrison (Ancient Letters: Classical and Late Antique Epistolography (2007)), for example, is advertised on the dust-jacket but unmentioned in the book itself, and in general C.'s chronological (as well as theoretical) horizons are narrow. This is not necessarily a fault in a volume on Jerome, but a wider perspective would have helped to secure a wider readership.

There are three appendices. The second (220–2) usefully sets out what is known about letters by Jerome that have not survived. The third (223–8) surveys the manuscript tradition, with a particular focus on the development of the letter-collection. About the merits of the first appendix (207–19) I am less convinced. C. offers a new taxonomy of the letters, based on the types described and exemplified in the epistolary handbooks of pseudo-Demetrius and pseudo-Libanius/pseudo-Proclus. First of all, with certain evident exceptions, such as the letter of recommendation, Latin epistolography in general might be thought less generically constrained than Greek. But more importantly, Jerome's own letters are not so easily typologized. The letters which C., following established tradition, classifies as consolatory, for instance, show wide variation: Ep. 39 contains rebuke as well as consolation; Ep. 118 could as readily be categorized as paraenetic or protreptic; Ep. 127 possesses some of the generic markers of consolation, but (as C. implicitly recognizes on p. 93: ‘epitaph’, ‘epistolary vita’) its general character is quite different from that of most ancient consolatory letters. Again, one might well ask how useful, or even how accurate, it is to classify Ep. 107, the letter to Laeta on the education of the younger Paula, as paraenetic; while to pigeonhole the epistolary ‘martyr’-narrative that is Ep. 1 as a letter of praise is to void this piece of most of its interest and significance. And this is the problem: C.'s taxonomy (which has to invent an epistolary category — ‘exegetic’ — to cover twenty-six of the letters) is — as such taxonomies commonly are — distortingly reductive. If Labourt's classification by subject-matter oversimplifies (208–9), so does C.'s own.

Such criticisms, however, should be seen in perspective. This was a book worth writing, and is a book worth reading.