The Historia monachorum Syriae, written by Theodoret of Cyrrhus in 444 AD, contains a large quantity of sports metaphors in which the ascetic was presented as the “athlete of God”. The origin of this metaphor goes back to the epistles of Paul of Tarsus. Afterwards, there were many Christian writers who included it in their writings, although Theodoret undoubtedly exploited it in a much more intense way than other authors. His abundant use of this metaphor was due to the (...) great popularity enjoyed by athletic contests in the eastern Mediterranean well into the fifth century. Moreover, the partially profane education of Theodoret allowed him to give a specific terminology to his sports metaphors hardly documentable in other writers of Christian antiquity. (shrink)

Saint Jerome was a prominent figure in the Hungarian-language literature prepared mainly for nuns in the last decade of the fifteenth and the first decades of the sixteenth century. A Dominican codex contains two legends about him (one of them is the translation of Pseudo-Augustine’s Epistola ad Cyrillum de magnificentiis beati Hieronymi), while a Franciscan manuscript preserved the Hungarian version of the Regula monachorum attributed to Jerome. The Franciscan András Nyujtódi represented the Church Father as a model teacher and (...) translator when quoting the great biblical philologist’s dedicatory lines to the Book of Judith in his translation of the same biblical book, which this Transylvanian friar prepared as a private reading for his sister, a Franciscan tertiary. Another self-proclaimed follower of Jerome’s translating activity was an anonymous Carthusian monk, who mentioned the Slavic Bible and liturgy prepared by the saintly scholar. – The paper presents the texts by and about Jerome, which can be found in the not very extensive late medieval Hungarian-language literature, and traces the image of the saintly author as represented for the audience of the corpus produced for Observant Dominican and Franciscan nuns, tertiaries, and in a few cases perhaps laypersons. (shrink)