Anne McGowan

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-pilgrimage-of-egeria/

Egeria is one of the really fascinating characters of late antiquity. She seems to have been an independent woman of means, from southern Gaul or possibly northern Spain, who went on a long journey to the Holy Land some time in the late fourth century – staying in Jerusalem for three years! – and wrote a detailed account to her lady friends back home, which survives in one eleventh-century manuscript (there are a couple of fragments elsewhere). The start and end of the document are lost, as are a couple of bits in the middle, but basically it’s in two halves: her journeys around Egypt, Palestine and Anatolia, and her description of Christian rituals in and around Jerusalem.

I mean, this is just extraordinary, isn’t it? Here we are in the not-quite-yet-fallen Roman Empire, and a single woman (if rich enough) can safely travel (well, with the occasional military escort) from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, to practice a religion which was actually illegal only a few decades earlier. It’s a fairly dry travelogue – no banter or hassle, just going from holy place to holy place to talk to the holy men and sometimes holy women – but the mind boggles that it was possible at all.

was also fascinated by the second part, about the rituals of Jerusalem – and again, bear in mind that Christianity had only emerged a few decades previously as an official and powerful cult; this is all pretty new stuff, rather than ritual hallowed by millennia of tradition. The birth of Christ is celebrated on the Epiphany. Lent is a period of fasting which ends before Easter. Different churches in the Greater Jerusalem area all get their turn during the eight day period of the major feasts. I found the language arrangements particularly interesting. Egeria herself would have been a Latin speaker; I wonder what the real balance of Syriac/Aramaic to Greek as native language was among the worshippers, beziehungsweise the inhabitants, of Jerusalem at the time.

I probably didn’t get as much out of this as someone who was really into the subject of early Christianity would do. I still found the narrative a breath of fresh air. We tend to think of early Christianity as being the dry-as-dust Church Fathers arguing with each other. This is a genteel lady wandering around the countryside and taking notes for her friends back home. It’s a wholly different perspective.… (mere)