Epistolae
· Damasus I of Rome
· 366-384 (his episcopate)
· letter
Latin · domain: latin-patristic-fourth-century · researched 2026-11-14
status unknown. No translation field exists in the source catalogue. This is an unresolved case, not a confirmed gap.
Why this is in the register
No English collection of Damasus's letters was located, but the negative result is weaker than for the other entries here and should be read as 'unknown' rather than 'none'. HOLLIS Primo for 'Damasus epigrams' (https://hollis.harvard.edu/discovery/search?query=any,contains,Damasus%20epigrams&tab=Everything&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&vid=01HVD_INST:HVD2&offset=0 returns Dennis E. Trout, 'Damasus of Rome: the epigraphic poetry' (Oxford, 2015: https://hollis.harvard.edu/permalink/f/1s5nto6/990144998880203941), which translates the verse inscriptions only, and the corpus of the letters is outside its scope. A query for 'Damasus letters' (https://hollis.harvard.edu/discovery/search?query=any,contains,Damasus%20letters&tab=Everything&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&vid=01HVD_INST:HVD2&offset=0 returns nothing relevant. The one recent English translation project covering papal letters of the period, D. L. D'Avray, 'Papal jurisprudence c. 400' (Cambridge, 2019), takes its documents from c. 385 onward, i.e. after Damasus's death, and its contents note (https://hollis.harvard.edu/discovery/search?query=any,contains,Papal%20jurisprudence%20c.%20400%20sources%20of%20the%20canon%20law%20tradition%20Davray&tab=Everything&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&vid=01HVD_INST:HVD2&offset=0 lists only thematic chapters on ritual, hierarchy, marriage, monks, heresy and penance. The Latin is PL 13 (Corpus Corporum text verified) and the letters also circulate in the Collectio Avellana.
Damasus's letters are short occasional documents — synodal letters, responses to enquiries, the Roman answers in the Apollinarian and Priscillianist affairs — but they are the record of how the see of Rome began to act as a court of appeal in the 370s and 380s, and they underlie the later decretal tradition. Marked 'unknown' because no English collection was found and the surviving corpus is scattered across PL 13 and the Collectio Avellana, so a complete English Damasus may exist in a form this survey did not reach. The scale is small (about 4,600 words), which makes verification and translation both cheap.
Jerome, Saint, -419 or 420. "Select letters." Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2014. https://hollis.harvard.edu/permalink/f/1s5nto6/99153676116203941
Jerome, Saint, -419 or 420. "Select Letters of Saint Jerome." London : Heinemann ; New York : G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1933. https://hollis.harvard.edu/permalink/f/1s5nto6/990043653290203941
"Hieronymus Romanus : studies on Jerome and Rome on the occasion of the 1600th anniversary of his death." Turnhout : Brepols, 2021. https://hollis.harvard.edu/permalink/f/1s5nto6/99156070117603941
Cain, Andrew. "The letters of Jerome : asceticism, biblical exegesis, and the construction of Christian authority in late antiquity." Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2009. https://hollis.harvard.edu/permalink/f/1s5nto6/990120025640203941
Prinzivalli, Emanuela. "The Gospel and the Church : The Words of Jesus in the Process of Ecclesiastical Institutionalization in Rome (First to Fifth Centuries)." Berlin, Germany : Walter de Gruyter GmbH, [2025]. https://hollis.harvard.edu/permalink/f/1s5nto6/99158433501703941