Talk:Paula of Rome

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Madamebutterflu.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 06:16, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

NPOV?

 * A devoted mother, she married her daughter
 * Letter CVIII, which, though somewhat rhetorical, is a wonderful production
 * Their peace was disturbed by constant annoyances
 * Paula's need of money, she having been ruined by her generosity.

The article needs a fair deal of copyedit to oust the more idolizing than factual accounts of Paula's life. Also the - possibly just a mock-up, yet historically documented - accusation of having an indecent affair with Jerome, while still in Rome, is not mentioned in the article at all and yet it could have been one of the reasons for her pilgrimage to

The same applies also for Eustochium, the texts incorporated from Catholic Encyclopedia seem to lack the neutral point and language Wikipedia is built on. --Oneliner 12:55, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

I agree. I'll work to make it more neutral, per your suggestions. --Polylerus 16:55, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Genealogy
The introduction states that St. Paula's family "frivolously claimed descent from Agamemnon," but the cited source does not appear to question that descent. It states, "She, who had once always dressed in silks, and who had been used to being carried about Rome by her eunuch slaves so that her feet might never touch the ground, who was descended from Agamemnon, and whose husband was descended from Aeneas, had joined Marcella's group of high-born, wealthy Roman ladies, who together attempted to follow a life of monastic severity." If the article is going to question the traditional genealogy of St. Paula, shouldn't a source be listed that justifies that position? 98.239.7.135 (talk) 05:27, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

Date Inaccuracies
The article first states that St. Paula was widowed at age 32, which would make the year 379 or 380. She does not meet St. Jerome until 382 AD. Later in the article under "Paula's Pilgrimage," it states she went on the pilgrimage with Jerome a year after her husband passed. These dates are conflicting. SireOfJunia (talk) 23:26, 12 October 2019 (UTC)

Collaboration with Jerome
Did anyone really study Jerome's letters, one by one? I can't see any other contemporary source for Paula's contribution to his work - comments as well as translations, especially the Vulgate. I have gathered and read through everything I could find online; you can see the result now in the article. But there's a clear disjunction between the influence, support, and direct contribution attributed to her and Eustachium by various authors and platforms, including Vatican News and Hardesty (PhD in 1976, professor of religion at Clemson University), not to mention the older feminists Diederick and Zahm. Zahm goes as far as to attribute to Paula & Eustachium the Psalms from the Vulgate: "the Psalter which has been adopted in our Vulgate, is not the translation made by Jerome from the Hebrew, but a corrected version of the Septuagint executed by Paula and Eustochium." The fact seems to be that Jerome produced a reworked version of older translations from LXX, which became the standard version in Church, known as the "Gallican Psalter", followed later (c. 393) by his own translation from the original, the less well-sounding, but by far more accurate and very different Psalterium juxta Hebraeos, 'according to the Hebrews', only used by scholars. So Zahm probably attributes the "Gallican Psalter" to P & E. Why? Zahm did lay claim to being a scholar, be it one sometimes led by enthusiasm and dabbling in science with the approach of the "man of faith", but he must have had it from somewhere. And this is the most blatant case of possible (probable?) exaggeration in this regard.

I have delivered the secondary facts, i.e. the modern perception of R & E's contribution, but hardly anything on the primary facts as offered by the sources. I did take more time with Jerome's letter 108 to Eustochium, written after Paula's death, one of his main epistles, and it doesn't seem to contain anything at all on this topic, which surprised me a bit, even though Jerome was writing with a certain set of literary formats in mind, which were all very far from a modern concept of a biography. But still. Wiki can be very superficial at times, as most editors are not academically educated in the fields they're editing in, which forces them to use whatever Google tends to bring up, some doing that better than others. I am leaving the article with a feeling of dissatisfaction with what I have been able to find out and write. Arminden (talk) 19:57, 8 September 2021 (UTC)