Early in the fourteenth century, clergy of Santa Maria Maggiore determined that their most precious relic, the Holy Crib, would acquire greater luster if reunited with the remains of St. Jerome, buried in the Cave of the Nativity in Bethlehem (Rice 1985: 49-63). An account was produced, describing how, centuries earlier, the saint appeared to a monk ‘‘dwelling in foreign lands’’ and told him to exhume his body for reburial next to the Chapel of the Presepio in the church of the Blessed Virgin at Rome. The Translation, reproduced among testimonies to Jerome in Migne (PL 22: 238-40), is accompanied by three letters. The first, containing an account of Jerome’s death, purports to come from his friend, Eusebius ofCremona. The second, written in the name of Augustine of Hippo to Cyril of Jerusalem, tells how Jerome’s departing soul appeared to several persons, including the writer. The third, Cyril’s reply, relates miracles that then occurred and how, despite efforts to rehouse the saint’s remains in a marble tomb, the corpse kept returning to the trench where it had been laid. Jerome told Cyril in a vision, ‘‘My body will never be moved by so much as an inch from the pit in which it lies until the city of Jerusalem has been captured by infidels, when it will be taken to Rome where it will repose for a long time.’’
These texts were circulated to insure that Jerome’s person would be forever linked with Santa Maria Maggiore. ‘‘I was by myself in my cell at Hippo,’’ writes ‘‘Augustine’’ to ‘‘Cyril.’’ ‘‘I had pen, papyrus and writing-tablet in hand, and was on the point of writing a letter to the most holy Jerome, . . . because I knew that no one living could give me clearer instruction. . . I had barely inscribed the words of the initial greeting ‘to Jerome,’ when suddenly the room where I was standing was filled with a light and a fragrance such as our time has never known and which it is beyond my power to express’’ (PL 22: 283-4). The emphasis on the epistolary-scribal situation betrays the technology of the whole dossier. Classical epistolary theory held that letters were a medium for the communion of separated souls. Christian letter-writers of the Later Roman Empire spiritualized the convention. That Jerome could still seem vividly present centuries later was attributable in part to his own ingenious use of the epistolary form. Since the accessibility of this monastic teacher outside his cell had always been a textual artifice, one way of reading him faithfully in later times was to reembody him in writings that would keep his person alive, not least at the claimed site of his tomb. The Roman ‘‘forger’’ took a leaf from the master’s book.
For his fourteenth-century votaries, Jerome belonged to the same time as themselves, imagined as the last of the world eras prophesied in Daniel, or as the sixth ‘‘day’’ in an Augustinian week of ages. By the first reckoning, the present age was as old as the Roman Empire, the dominion of which had been inherited by popes and Holy Roman Emperors (Goez 1958). By the second, it began with the Incarnation, dated to the reign of Augustus. Either way, it had so far run without a break for over 1,300 years and would end only with the end of time itself, foretold in Revelation. No consistent stress was placed on the phenomena that we, following Gibbon and Renaissance precedent, take to signify the transition from an ancient Roman to a medieval, Christian world: the documents or monuments of that transition were not yet visible as such. ‘‘In the writings of the Middle Ages, the Fall of Rome is scarcely noticed, and nowhere felt to be a puzzle in need of explanation’’ (Demandt 1984: 89). Changes perceived to have occurred in the centuries since Christ and Augustus could be articulated in terms of‘‘translation’’ or ‘‘revision.’’ Writing - often, rewriting - was instrumental to the process. The translation and revision of Jerome belong to hagiography. The same function characterized other genres, including universal history or chronicle, biblical exegesis, and the bio-bibliographical compendium of ‘‘Famous Men’’ (De viris illustribus). All were extensible, uninterrupted, encompassing forms: textual instantiations of a continuity of culture subject to the unity of divinely created Nature transfigured by Dante as the Book of the Universe (Paradiso 33. 85-6).
If contemporaries expressed surprise at the new proofs of Jerome’s return to Rome, their scruples have gone unrecorded. The authenticity of the letters of ‘‘Eusebius,’’ ‘‘Augustine,’’ and ‘‘Cyril’’ was not seriously questioned until Erasmus denounced them as fictions in his landmark edition of the Opera Hieronymi in 1516. Erasmus treated the contents of the dossier as documents and monuments in the modern historical sense: as cultural artifacts with a specific relation to their time and place of production, rather than as elements of a timeless re-presentation of ‘‘Jerome.’’ He had no way of proving that the dust preserved in the Roman basilica was not Jerome’s. The exclusive objects of his ‘‘archaeology’’ were the verbal forms that we now call ‘‘texts,’’ specifically those bearing the higher knowledge that he and others of like mind called bonae litterae. These men were philologists - editors, textual critics, commentators - whose application to texts reflected a broader interest in the survivals of an ancient culture: ‘‘Philology and antiquarianism had been inseparable in antiquity; they were again inseparable in the Renaissance’’ (Momigliano 1990: 71). Renaissance ‘‘humanism’’ favored types of discourse for which there were classical models, known as ‘‘humane studies’’ (studia humanitatis):. grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy. But it was not only the humanists’ choice of models that set them apart from, and in some cases against, their equally learned contemporaries. Far more radical and disruptive was their claim to restore a lost culture.
The tale of how long-standing habits of transhistorical ‘‘presentism’’ gave way in western Europe to the collective consciousness of the ancient past as something cut off from the present, recoverable only with the greatest difficulty, has been told many times - usually as the invention of the ‘‘Middle Ages’’ and the ‘‘Renaissance.’’ We shall now consider whether it may not also include the discovery of‘‘Late Antiquity.’’
World History
