Jerome's circle of female addressees extends all over the empire: aside from the 'Aventine circle', his letters are sent to women living in Gaul, Spain, Africa and Constantinople. This paper will offer an overview of such a network and of the literacy of Jerome's female interlocutors, which, as he explicitly says in his preface to his Commentary on Zephaniah, he prefers to men in discussing religious life and exegesis. Being empowered by an unprecedented independence, Jerome's female correspondents travel unchaperoned to the Holy Land, personally oversee their finances, and spend their families' fortunes on the creation of "strongholds of asceticism" to the discomfort of the Roman senatorial élite, as is evident when leafing through contemporary legislation. Further, this paper will also discuss Ep. 46 as an example of a first-hand witness to the female agency of Jerome's closest associates. This letter is the only text penned by women transmitted in the collection, at least if one trusts the paratext, which reads, with minor variants in the manuscript tradition: Paulae et Eustochiae exhortatoria ad Marcellam de locis sanctis. Despite its heading attributing the letter to Paula and Eustochium and the potential interest this text may have attracted, the letter was given little to no attention by scholarship until recently, having been repeatedly deemed to have been written by Jerome, in the guise of the two women.