Mateusz Fafinski, Widows and Wanderings: Current affairs in Jerome’s letters

Description: Jerome left us with a large, but highly curated set of letters. These contain not only an insight into his views on topics as diverse as marriage or  correct readings of Isaiah but also many mentions of current affairs. Long treated as a valuable source for the tumultuous decades at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries, these letters remain problematic. While previous generations of scholars took many reports of Jerome at face value, these can only be read in their proper narrative context that includes problematic and complicated entanglements of their author with issues of gender, religion and exegetics. In this talk I intend to deconstruct Jerome’s position as a reporter on current affairs by putting his letters on the crises of the empire in light of his narrative strategies. What emerges is a picture of a man with a convoluted relationship to history and politics, always in the shadow of his view on salvation.

Biography: I am a historian and digital humanist. I am currently a fellow at the University of Tübingen, affiliate researcher of CESTA Stanford, and an Assistant Lecturer at Freie Universität Berlin. Previously, I was a TextTechnologies Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. I work on the nature of historical sources in the digital sphere, mapping medieval Latin manuscripts, and the role of urban space in early medieval societies as well as the inheritance of Rome in the post-Roman world.

Between 2015 and 2018, I did my PhD at the Berlin Graduate School of Ancient Studies within the program Ancient Languages and Texts. My dissertation (2018) examines the uses of the material past in early medieval Britain, and was published in 2020 by Amsterdam University Press as Roman Infrastructure in Early Medieval Britain: The Transformation of the Past in Text and Stone. I studied classical philology, Mediterranean culture studies and history in Poznan and Leeds, as well as British studies at Humboldt University Berlin.

Lunch will be provided at event. This event will not be available via zoom and will not be recorded.