In honor of the Feast of Saint Jerome (d. -419 or 420), patron saint of librarians, scholars, and translators, Woodstock Theological Library (WTL) features here a woodcut by Albrect Dürer (1471-1528) depicting Saint Jerome in his study, pausing for a moment to pull a thorn out of a lion’s paw. After this unusual and courageous encounter, the lion will stay by his side, when translating, or in his ascetic moments of mortification of the flesh.
This Dürer woodcut comes from Liber Epistolarum sancti Heironymi. This incunabulum was printed by Nikolaus Kessler (ca. 1445-1519) at Basel in 1497. Liber Epistolarum sancti Heironymi is among WTL’s small but significant incunabula collection that is in the process of being digitized and made available in DigitalGeorgetown. About Saint Jerome’s work and life, Andrew Cain writes the following: “For the entirety of his career as a Christian writer, from the early 370s until his death c .419, Jerome’s predominant ambition was to achieve pre-eminence both as an orthodox biblical scholar and as a practitioner and teacher of ascetic Christianity. He was disinclined to follow a more traditional religious career path in the ecclesiastical cursus honorum; a bibliophile with a strong monastic bent, he preferred to forge his own vocation as a monk.” The Letters of Jerome, asceticism, biblical exegesis and the construction of Christian authority in late antiquity. (Oxford Early Christian Studies) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. p. 3.
Entry authored by Amy E. Phillips, Rare Materials Cataloger for WTL on 9/30/2016