ferent from one another in length, addressee, and content, can be considered narrative letters show specific narrative techniques and strategies. What makes them ,narrative' is the author's behaviour: he is pleased to narrate episodes, places, memoirs, novels, or exempla to his friends, trying to persuade them to embrace (or persist in following) his monastic way of life. We can talk about ,weak narrativity' because they incorporate a proliferation of ,minor' narrative genres to be compared to the Lives and divided into three main periods. The inner and extratextual functions of these epistles change throughout these periods, especially since letter-writing is: »a form not only of representing but of constituting reality«, of constituting, in the case of Jerome, his reliability and the monastic movement itself, its history, its heroes and heroines.