In the last generation, intellectual history has become incarnate. Overlapping histories of the book, of reading practices, and of the practice of scholarship itself have transformed the history of ideas. Approaches initiated by historians studying the influence of moveable type and the circulation of printed books in early modern Europe have been adapted and extended backward to the ancient world and forward to our own age of wireless laptops. To be sure, leading intellectual historians have long recognized the importance of contextualizing texts, reconstructing the circumstances in which thinkers wrote so as to illuminate their ideas. But they rarely paid much attention to the material culture of books and manuscripts, the physical layout of classrooms or salons, the costs and connotations of education, or the ways in which scholars garnered financial support and were able, in concrete terms, to disseminate their ideas. That intellectuals of every time and place are flesh-and-blood human beings apparently seemed a fact too banal to be significant. It turns out that it's not. For as the societies, institutions, and technological realities within which intellectuals work have varied enormously in the West from the ancient Mediterranean world through the Middle Ages to the present, so have their constraints, opportunities, and experiences diverged. In The Monk and the Book, Megan Hale Williams applies this sort of deeply contextualized intellectual history to Jerome (c.347-419), the formidably learned late antique scholar and irascible ascetic behind the Vulgate Bible, the text that would stand at the center of Christian civilization for more than a millennium.

Two principal objectives run throughout Williams' book. First, she seeks to reconstruct the social circumstances and material realities within which Jerome worked as a biblical scholar, from his education in Rome during the 360s until his death at the Bethlehem monastery in 419. Williams integrates a wide range of scholarship on late antique education, the culture of manuscript production and dissemination, scholarly patronage, and the nature of ancient libraries in order to explore the distinctive character of Jerome's own scholarly resources and methods. Jerome's élite, classical education—like the schooling of Augustine and other learned male Christian contemporaries—stressed the mastery of rhetoric and composition, modeled on thorough familiarity with a canon of traditional Latin authors. The library at the Bethlehem monastery, where after leaving Rome Jerome lived and worked as a biblical translator and commentator beginning in late 385, was extensive, almost certainly containing more than a thousand substantial volumes. Because all such books were copied by hand—primarily as papyrus codices, a particularly late antique book form—they were expensive. As an exegete, Jerome worked especially from Greek and Hebrew sources at his disposal, sometimes translating and incorporating without attribution, sometimes paraphrasing, sometimes thoroughly reworking materials from multiple authors. Like other learned writers in late antiquity, he often composed by dictation and used assistants who read aloud to him; over several decades, he also employed Jewish teachers to aid him with philological and contextual issues in the Hebrew texts to which he devoted so much scholarly energy. Williams' painstaking reconstructions enable us to get behind the famous Renaissance portraits of the biblical translator anachronistically ensconced in an idealized, late medieval monastic cell.

Williams' second principal concern is to interpret Jerome's biblical scholarship in the context of his identity as both late antique érudit and ascetic Christian monk: "The tension between the classical literary culture of the imperial elite, and the ascetic Christian focus on the Bible that emerged in its shadow, shaped everything Jerome did, thought, and wrote." The intellectual achievements of medieval Benedictines and early modern Maurists have so associated monasticism with scholarship that it is well to be reminded of the gulf between the social milieux that sustained late antique Ciceronian eloquence and the austerities of the Desert Fathers. Their combination took no little doing, and was a fits-and-starts achievement to which Jerome made major contributions. Williams, however, portrays the matter differently—not in the end as two cultures in tension, elements from which Jerome creatively found ways to integrate, but rather as antinomies he failed to overcome.

For example, because Jerome assembled and used a library worth "a senatorial fortune," employed literary assistants, and paid his Jewish teachers well, he subverted his ascetic commitments: "Scholarship thereby violates the monastic norm of poverty." Similarly, because exegesis involves the exercise of critical judgment and the interpretation of the biblical text, it "implies the interpreter's authority over the sacred word" and so "can readily be seen to violate the norm of humility." In short, because Jerome was a scholar he couldn't really be a monk. Scholarship and poverty, exegesis and humility having been depicted as irreconcilable, Williams repeatedly represents Jerome as disingenuous, aiming to mask his own assertions of authority behind an "elaborate parade of humility." Indeed, so focused is Williams on Jerome's "self-fashioning" and "self-presentation," his "self-promotion" and "self-importance," that she writes with respect to his reported method of commentary: "Reality seems, this once, solidly to support his self-portrayal" (my emphasis). Yet Williams' presentation depends upon interpreting certain of Jerome's remarks as though he intended them as comprehensive, literal descriptions of the entirety of his working methods—an odd decision for a historian so attuned to the customs of Jerome's heavily rhetorical literary culture. She then mines his vast oeuvre for contradictions, which unsurprisingly are found. Thus Jerome is caught out by the scholar who fails to fall for his fa&ccedit;ade.

Williams finds fault, too, with Jerome's scholarly assumptions in his biblical commentaries. For example, in her lucid exposition of Jerome's exegesis, Williams regards as "idiosyncratic" and "a carefully fashioned construct" Jerome's insistence on the Masoretic Hebrew text, over against champions of the Greek Septuagint tradition, as the basis for his Latin translation and interpretive work. Contrary to Jerome's supposition, "modern scholarship posits" that the Septuagint reflected a distinct, independent textual tradition among Diaspora Jews in the Hellenistic world; it was not a less authentic translation of the Masoretic text, whose primacy Jerome asserted. Williams does not consider the possibility that Jerome was understandably misguided in thinking his insistence would provide Christians with closer access to the original of God's Word in the language of his chosen people. Instead, his "tactics" served his self-assertion as "an implicit but unchallengeable authority as arbiter of biblical truth," arrogating to himself a critic's dominance over Christian exegetes who worked from the Septuagint without knowledge of Hebrew. Clearly Jerome was mistaken; but is Williams' interpretation therefore justified? Granted that the Masoretic text had become largely hegemonic among Hebrew textual traditions by the second century after Christ, it is hard to see how Jerome can be expected to have known, more than two centuries later, the complex realities of textual traditions in relationship to widespread, Mediterranean religious communities that modern scholars only began to untangle subsequent to the discoveries at Qumran in the 1940s. Jerome's assumption that the only Hebrew textual tradition he knew was more authentic because it was in the ante-Hellenized language of the Jews hardly seems to warrant Williams' imputations.

Similarly, Williams devotes several pages to the way in which Jerome "rigidly and artificially" coupled the historical sense of Scripture with the Hebrew text, while simultaneously relying on the Septuagint for the more theologically important, allegorical meanings for which he thought the Hebrew provided both necessary bases and constraints. According to Williams, this too was a means by which Jerome sought tacitly to assert his authority over Christian interpreters who lacked Hebrew, making himself the arbiter of allegorical interpretation by positioning himself as gatekeeper of the Hebrew text. But if Jerome understandably (albeit mistakenly) thought that the Masoretic text was primary, then linguistic knowledge of Hebrew obviously was necessary to interpret what it said (a point that in the 17th century Spinoza, in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, would make against Christian theologians ignorant of Hebrew).

It was not arbitrary that Jerome insisted on knowledge of Hebrew, the Jews' own language, for the historical meaning of Scripture, nor that he turned overwhelmingly to the Septuagint and its interpreters for an extensive Christian tradition of allegorical commentary. The Septuagint was the Scripture of early Christians, augmented by the Greek writings of what became the New Testament, and there simply was no developed Christian tradition of allegorical commentary on the Hebrew text. The historical meaning of the text was absolutely necessary lest allegorical interpretation become capricious. Yet the historical meaning, whether in Hebrew or Greek, could never suffice for Christian exegesis, since according to Christians it was only in the person of Jesus that God's design of  salvation had been realized. If Christianity was true, then the writings of the Old Testament had also to be interpreted christocentrically and allegorically, else they were not interpreted correctly. Far from Jerome's idiosyncratic tactic, this had been central to Christian exegesis since Paul.

Throughout her book, Williams reads Jerome with a hermeneutics of suspicion now common in humanistic scholarship. If one's interpretive grounding derives from Bourdieu, Foucault, and Greenblatt (all of whom Williams cites approvingly), then predictably, Jerome's decades of ascetic, scholarly labor in the Palestinian desert can only have served his own self-assertion within a mundane horizon of power relations. As a result, not much is left of Jerome: "what compels attention to Jerome is not the person, but the persona. Questions of character, in the face of self-fashioning so nimbly executed and so often readjusted, become if not irrelevant, then uninteresting." Unless the herme-neutics of suspicion is itself suspect, symptomatic and comprehensible as a construct with its own context and history.

Jerome no doubt was a prickly, difficult man, a reputation that has followed him since the 5th century. But he is hardly uninteresting if interpreted less cynically, if one is willing to see his scholarship as he did: a lived reality embedded in the routine of prayer, faith, worship, and relationship to God within the church, oriented toward eternal salvation, the whole of which provided his scholarly telos, just as its fruits for other Christians justified the vast expenses required to pursue biblical scholarship, without compelling monks to live luxuriously. In one of his earliest letters, Jerome extolled to Rufinus the rewards of the ascetic's withdrawal: "in the companionship of Christ he is not alone" and he "hears God speaking to him as he reads Holy Scripture, and speaks with God as he calls on the Lord in prayer." Near the end of his lengthy, famous epistle 22 to Eustochium written in 384, Jerome counseled, "As many times as the world's vain ambition delights you, as many times as you see in the world something boastful, transport yourself in your mind to paradise; begin to be now what you will become in the future."

"We have one profit," he wrote in consolation to Heliodorus in 396, "that we are united in the love of Christ." Jerome's letters and life are inseparable from a religiosity almost entirely ignored by Williams, who divorces his scholarship from his faith. Whether Jerome's religiosity is uninteresting would seem to be a function of individual scholarly preference, but more seriously and in large measure it answers "[t]he question of motivation," which Williams claims "must remain wholly opaque." Not so—but greater translucence requires a willingness to clear away the obstructions imposed by presuppositions ill-suited to one's subject. Contentment with the persona and disinterest in the person sit uneasily with Williams' commitment to the human realities of Christian intellectual life in late antiquity, and "the matters that were important to Jerome."

Brad S. Gregory is Dorothy G. Griffin Associate Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Notre Dame.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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