other · 384 · Rome
Eustochium was the third daughter of Paula and had taken the vow young. Jerome wrote her a letter of enormous length in her mother's house on the Aventine, and he lists it in his own catalogue of his writings as To Eustochius, On maintaining virginity. Its advice on diet, company and reading is severe, but what made it notorious was the satire: on Roman clergy who dined their way through wealthy widows' houses, on consecrated women who were consecrated in name only, on the whole apparatus of ascetic fashion in a city that had discovered it. He was not forgiven. Damasus, his protector, died that December; Blaesilla, Eustochium's elder sister, died later the same year after a fast the city blamed on Jerome; and within a year he had left Rome for good. Nothing from the letter itself is quoted here, because the volume that carries it is not in this project's archive.
To tell a girl of sixteen who had already taken the vow what it would actually cost her.
The most influential Latin treatise on consecrated virginity of its century, and the enemies that drove its author out of Rome within a year.