The dissertation manuscript then travelled with me from West Coast to East, at which point I was again pregnant and the journey also led to my own birth as a professional scholar, entering upon a first academic appointment. The account of the Priscillianist controversy was conceived simultaneously with my first child, James, and written in the form of a doctoral dissertation during his infancy. The metaphor may, however, claim particular suitability in this case. The comparison of texts to children, of writing to labor, is by no means novel-it was already a rhetorical commonplace in late antiquity. With Jerome, I have continued to ask, "Why speak of Priscillian, who was condemned by the secular sword and by the whole world?" In the course of the long gestation of this project, new answers have emerged for me, without entirely displacing previous responses.ĭespite my confessed hesitance, I am also unquestionably relieved to be delivered of the burden of this work. By holding on to these pages a bit longer, I might not so much tell a different or better tale as give a better account of why the tale is worth telling in the first place. A text, "once issued, can never be recalled," Sulpicius Severus wisely observed, and I am tempted, if not to abstain altogether from publishing this monograph, at least to defer doing so.
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