Julian of Norwich's Showings and Its Contexts © Julia Bolton Holloway, 1997

HELENA, EGERIA, AND PAULA:

THE BIBLE AND WOMEN PILGRIMS

St Birgitta at Prayer, 1492 Revelationes

{In this essay you will go on pilgrimage with me and with other women, who, guided by the Bible, travelled to the Holy Places in Israel, to Nazareth, Bethelehem and Jerusalem, and to Sinai in Egypt, modeling their journeys upon those Mary took, in the fourth and fourteenth centuries, women such as Helena, Egeria, Paula, Eustochium, Birgitta and Margery, women from Spain, Italy, Sweden and even England.

Helena / Egeria / Paula & Eustochium / Birgitta /& Margery

I. Helena

{Let me begin with the Empress Helena (+327), mother of the Emperor Constantine (+337), who visited the Holy Places, such as Bethlehem, Jerusalem and Sinai, who decreed where their churches would be built, and established for Christendom the cult of the Cross. Eusebius of Caesaria (260-339) wrote the account of Constantine and Helena's pilgrimages and building programmes in the Holy Places. Eusebius emphasizes Constantine as undertaking the excavations on Golgotha and building the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 335.(1) Later legend will have this archeology and architecture be Helena's.(2) Eusebius affirms Helena's actions in this area in connection with the Bethlehem cave and basilica and with that on the Mount of Olives.(3) He touchingly describes how she wished, quoting Psalm 132.7, to `worship at the place whereon his feet have stood.' He also describes how

Reading between Eusebius' lines we see that Helena, who died at eighty in 327, preceded, with her building programme at Bethlehem and the Mount of Olives, those of Constantine in Jerusalem; Eusebius noting that Constantine's programme there is partly in memory of his mother. It is likely that the present Mount Sinai is not the true Sinai of Exodus but a mountain Helena decreed by fiat to be Mount Sinai and that declaration is taken on faith by pilgrims to this day. Thus Helena, the Christian Empress, could give to later women and men in her own century and in others, a pattern centered upon power, piety, and pilgrimage. She lived out those words read from Isaiah by Christ in the synagogue at Nazareth.

II. Egeria

{Sixty years later, in A.D. 381-384, a Spanish nun, Egeria, is to be found at Mount Sinai, from there traveling to Jerusalem and Constantinople, in the footsteps of the prophets, of Christ, - and of the Empress Helena. Then, a year after Egeria's departure from the Holy Places, Jerome, accompanied by Paula and her daughter Eustochium, took up residence in Bethlehem, in A.D. 385.

Let me begin with Egeria - where her surviving, mutilated manuscript has us begin - in view of Mount Sinai.(4) Being interested not only in Egeria and Paula but also in women who came after them and who imitated them, such as Saint Birgitta of Sweden and Margery Kempe of Norfolk (and as well, in Dante's use of Mount Sinai for Mount Purgatorio), I too took their pilgrimages to Israel and Sinai and at two o'clock in the morning with a group of Franciscan-led pilgrims climbed Mount Sinai. This is what Egeria and I and you would have seen from the summit at dawn.

Egeria's account of her pilgrimages made Bible in hand throughout the Holy Places comes down to us in several forms. One is in the letters she wrote and sent back to Spain to her fellow nuns. That text survives, in mutilated form, from a manuscript likely copied out in Monte Cassino in the eleventh century. Another version is in a seventh-century letter written in her praise and in which the Galician monk Valerius urges his fellow monks to emulate her. Another is in a compilation made at Monte Cassino by Peter the Deacon in the twelfth century. Because Valerius' seventh-century text clearly had access to the now fragmentary version we posses of the manuscript written by Egeria in the fourth century, let me give an excerpt.

Thus the seventh-century letter has us reach Mount Sinai where Egeria's own manuscript now has us first find her, in her emulation of the pilgrimages of Empress Helena. Valerius goes on to narrate of her other mountain ascents including those of Tabor, the Beatitudes, Carmel and the Quarantana above Jericho, all of which the Franciscan-guided pilgrimage likewise visited in 1992.

Egeria's own account tells us of the prospect of Sinai and its valley and about the mountain's ascent by stone steps:

She will elsewhere similarly stress that linking of the physical pilgrimage with its mental recollection through the book of the Bible, in her case the Old Latin Bible as Jerome was yet to write the Vulgate.(8) She says

She next tells us of their descent.

Today, the Constantinian church with its Burning Bush, is immured about with walls, becoming the monastery of St. Catherine of Alexandria, these walls being built by Justinian and repaired by Napoleon. But, apart from these walls and the addition of the St. Catherine legend, all is as Egeria had described it in the fourth century, the imposed fiction of all these Biblical places as being clustered together at this mountain and in this valley being carried on to this day. Indeed, when one makes this pilgrimage, it really does not seem to matter to know that the pilgrims' Mount Sinai is likely not the true Mount Sinai. The fact that generations of pilgrims have made this ascent with this belief endows this physical mountain with sanctity.(11) The fact that one sees what is held to be the Burning Bush with one's own eyes creates the Shekinah.

The text next has us journey with Egeria from Sinai to other Holy Places.(12)

The manuscript which we have of Egeria's pilgrimage to the Holy Places is incomplete, lacking its beginning, its ending and several pages within its body. It is one copied out likely in Monte Cassino in the eleventh century, later coming to Arezzo.(13) The manuscript, when intact, had been used by other writers, compiling accounts of the Holy Places. One such compiler is Peter the Deacon, a monk of Monte Cassino, who in 1137 dedicated his text to his Abbot Guibald. Peter the Deacon used both Bede's work on the Holy Places and Egeria's.(14) It is possible in Peter the Deacon's text, using Valerius' seventh-century letter concerning Egeria, to identify those sections which once were in Egeria's text. It is from the text of Peter the Deacon that Egeria's descriptions of the region about Galilee can best be found. She speaks of St. Peter's House being made into a church at Capharnaum and of the adjacent synagogue, both of which pilgrims can see today. She also speaks of nearby Tabgha with its stone steps going down into the lake where Jesus had stood - and where pilgrims step down into the waters to this day - and of the stone on which Christ placed the bread of the miracle of the loaves and fishes, now made, she says, into an altar. Nearby, she notes, is the Mount of the Beatitudes.(15) In the surviving manuscript text she visits such places as Elijah's brook of Cherith and Jacob's Well, while also going farther afield to see the shrines of Holy Thecla(16) and of Holy Euphemia.(17) She next goes on to Constantinople, then gives her `loving ladies' a full account of the Jerusalem liturgy.(18)

Egeria's account of Mount Sinai is a major focal point in her work. Her other most important section is the discussion of the liturgy carried out in Jerusalem. She particularly praises the Jerusalem liturgy's use of suitably juxtaposed lessons from the Old and New Testaments in tandem with the Gospel readings. With Cyril of Jerusalem's Catechetical Lectures first delivered in Constantine's basilica for the Holy Sepulchre in A.D. 348 and with Egeria's Pilgrimage of 381-84, we can come to an understanding of the liturgy as carried out by the Primitive Church, in particular that of Jerusalem, founded by Christ and James, versus that by Peter and Paul in Rome.(19) What Egeria has to say about the Jerusalem liturgy lies more in the domain of the East rather than the West, but she is transmitting that valuable information to her fellow nuns on the shores of the Atlantic. The Church is thus indebted to women such as Helena, Egeria, Paula and Eustochium for peacefully forging again the links between Jerusalem and Rome, between the East and the West, despite the tensions underlying them.

Egeria begins her account of the Jerusalem liturgy first by telling of an ordinary week's activities in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

She next describes the celebrations at Epiphany at both Bethlehem and at Jerusalem, following that with the account for Easter.

She next discusses the Lenten/Easter Cathechesis by the bishop Cyril of Jerusalem of the sponsors of the baptismal candidates in which he teaches the entire Bible and the Creed, article by article, for three hours each day of the forty days of Lent.(20)

Then the manuscript, which has also lost several pages within its text, tantalizingly breaks off. Now we do have an abbreviated version of these lectures, not one for every day in Lent or even in the Easter Octave, but only five, and likely written not by Cyril but by his successor John. These give us a more complete description of the Jerusalem Eucharist.(21)

Egeria accurately observed Christian religious practices on different continents, Africa and Asia, than her own of Europe and left a most important record of them. She was willing to pay heed to the Greek of the liturgy used in Jerusalem, though she was writing her account in Latin. She noted that the great basilicas in Jerusalem and Bethlehem were built by Constantine and adorned by Helena.(22) She portrays to us as well as to her intended audience of fourth-century nuns in distant Spain a figure in a landscape who, Bible in hand, participates fully in that sacred geography, responding to it with knowledge and joy.

III. Paula and Eustochium

{Nor is Egeria the only European woman to visit the Holy Places in Africa and Asia during this period and to write letters describing her experiences. Let us also look at the Roman matron and widow Paula and her virgin daughter Eustochium.(23) Paula and Eustochium wrote an important, joint, and most joy-filled letter to their friend in Rome, Marcella, published as Jerome's Epistola XLVI/46, in which they described their pilgrimage in A.D. 385 to the Holy Places, to Africa, to Israel, before settling down for the rest of their lives with Jerome in Bethlehem, financially supporting him and assisting his labours with translating the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin, the Vulgate text to which Egeria did not have access. We often see paintings of scarlet-clad Cardinal Jerome in his study at his labours, but his womenfolk are forgotten and omitted from those canvesses, except in one, now in the National Gallery in London, but which was at San Girolamo in Fiesole, which shows the widowed Paula, at her side her most beautiful virgin daughter, Eustochium.

Paula movingly contrasts the wealth of Rome and the poverty of Bethlehem:(24)

Paula has written a Christian Georgics, a Christian pastoral, though as if through the eyes of Karl Marx, Simone Weil, and Frantz Fanon. These insights into the injustices of privileged wealth bridge time; one can find them in the Prophets and the Gospels, in Horace and Juvenal, in Wyclif and More; but they are especially likely to be perceived by women who stand outside the structures of power, such as Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, and Nadine Gordimer. Her style is shaped by Cicero and Virgil, Horace and Juvenal; while her social thought is shaped by the Prophets, the Gospels and by Josephus. But in it she has also presented a discussion of the places she and her daughter physically visited in Jerusalem, Bethany, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Galilee, Cana, Tabgha, Capharnaum, Egypt and elsewhere, noting often the meanings of the Hebrew names of places and blending that philological knowledge with theology. Hebrew is a language centered upon the word, even the word for English's 'thing' being what is a spoken word, dabar, with the implication that all creation is God's Word and Adam's naming. Paula and Egeria grasp at that concept and for both the names of places deeply involve the meaning of those names with the place.(24)

Paula's pilgrimage, like Egeria's, is a mapping out in time and space, using the Bible to understand the lands of the Bible. But Paula adds to Egeria's knowledge of the Bible in its Old Latin translation and her curiosity about Greek and comparative liturgy, her own knowledge not only of classical Latin but also of Greek and the Hebrew she is avidly studying. Helena, Egeria and Paula all use time and space, the book of the Bible and geography of the Holy Land as their Internet upon which to weave a web of links to sanctity, retrieving what is hallowed and hallowing.

Twenty years later, Jerome was to write another letter, his Epistola CVIII/108, praising Paula, and in it recapitulating the description of the pilgrimage that she had made. We learn much about Paula in Jerome's voluminous writings. He tells of her luxurious Roman life, her wealth, and her very great status. 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. Jerome became their teacher, expounding the Scriptures to them. But he quarrelled with Church officials in Rome most bitterly and found it expedient to return to Bethlehem. Paula and her daughter, Eustochium, joined him there, Paula leaving behind the rest of her children weeping on the quay. In the Holy Land Paula studied Hebrew so that she might sing the psalms, the chief early Christian devotional practice, in their original language and assist him in his translation work. She lived for twenty years in Bethlehem, dying there in A.D. 404.(25) Paula and Eustochium's letter to Marcella pleads with their old friend that she leave Rome, called in the letter a 'Babylon,' and come to Jerusalem and its Holy Places. Kelly, p. 141, remarks that this letter is 'written in the name of Paula and her daughter but manifestly by Jerome himself, to Marcella,' then goes on to say, 'It is an idyllic piece, relating spiritual serenity and contentment . . . and stands in striking contrast to the querulous, vituperative note' of Jerome's typical writings. We find other male scholars making the same statements of Heloise's letters, that they are Abelard's, yet that they are in a totally different style than his.

The letter in question is Epistola XLVI.(26) It describes Paula's pilgrimages to all these Holy Places in such a way as to have Marcella participate in their sacred journeying, mentally, and vicariously, in her imagination. Paula and Eustochium begin their letter by stating that, although the Crucifixion may have made Jerusalem an accursed place, there is ample scriptural justification for Christians to return to that holy city. Paula relies not only on the Scriptures and upon her growing knowledge of Hebrew but also upon Cicero for her arguments, describing both St. Paul speaking of his need to return to Jerusalem and Cicero speaking of his need to learn one's Greek not only in Sicily but in Athens, one's Latin not in Lilybaeum but in Rome. She adds, in a capstone to her argument, that Jerusalem is `our Athens.' She then quotes Virgil's First Eclogue on the great distance of the British Isles from Rome in noting that Christian Gauls and Britons all make haste to come, not to Rome, but to far Jerusalem. Jerome is also fond of this phrase, but states it the opposite way: 'Et de Hierosolymis et de Britannia aequaliter patet aula coelestis: regnum enim dei intra nos est,' Epistola LVIII. Chaucer may have had it in mind with his Wife of Bath, who so often speaks of Jerome. Jerome writes the letter after Paula's death in 404, giving Paula's vita to her virgin daughter, Eustochium.(27) In contrast to Paula's letter to Marcella, Jerome's account of the pilgrimage Paula made is almost barren of references to classical authors. He does, however, mention the 'fables of the poets,' de fabulis Poetarum, in giving the tale of Andromeda chained to a rock, as happening at Joppa, which he notes was also the harbor of the fugitive Jonah. He had earlier cited some lines of the Aeneid concerning the Greek Isles. But, unlike Paula, he does not show off his classical learning. He is here being more Christian than Ciceronian. (We recall his dream in which he is chided, or chides himself, by being told, 'Thou art not a Christian. Thou art a Ciceronian.' (28) But it is full of descriptions of her great piety and of her deep emotional participation in the past drama of the present places which she visits. He feminizes her. He is writing in her praise as had Valerius in that of Egeria. The letter waxes most sentimental about her parting from her family members, describing her as torn between the love of her children and her love for God.

He notes Paula's deep, affective piety at the Cross and the Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and at the cave and church in Bethlehem, which she had not particularly stressed herself.(29) He amplifies her previous words to Marcella and speaks of her as prostrating herself before the Cross, almost seeing upon it the hanging body of the Lord, as she prays, and as kissing the stones, the one which the angel had rolled away and the one in the Holy Sepulchre on which the Lord had lain. Then he describes her entering into the cave of the Nativity, weeping and as if seeing the Virgin wrapping the Child in swaddling clothes and placing him in the manger between the ox and the ass written of in the Prophets, the Magi adoring him, the star shining above, the Mother nursing the Child, the shepherds coming by night and seeing the Word which was made flesh as John wrote in the beginning of his Gospel: 'In principio erat verbum et verbum caro factum est.' One should note that Jerome, Paula and Eustochium lived in the adjacent cave, which one can still see today, reached by a passage from that of the Nativity, beneath the sanctuary in the Empress Helena's Bethlehem basilica.

Jerome's account in Epistola CVIII/108 ends by saying, and unconsciously echoing Valerius:

It is an interesting relationship, that between Paula and Jerome. We should not forget that Chaucer will play upon it when he writes the Wife of Bath's Prologue, in which he has the Wife, in her scarlet garb, visit the same Holy Places as did St. Paula, and has her constantly cite, not classical authors, but St. Jerome, especially his treatise, Adversus Jovinianum, his diatribe against marriage and widowhood, in which he advocates, as he also did in a letter to Paula's daughter Eustochium, perpetual virginity.(31)

IV. Birgitta, Margery and Julian

{For Egeria's and Paula's journeys are replicated a thousand years later in fiction by the Wife of Bath, in fact by Saint Birgitta of Sweden(32) and Margery Kempe of England (33). In their writings we can see some of the reverberations of that relationship between Paula and Jerome, and we can also see how Paula as a pilgrim became a model of other Christian women, one of power and financial independence, in so doing achieving much admiration, even from such a misogynist as St. Jerome. Egeria's text, however, at this period was forgotten.

Birgitta when she had been a young wife in Sweden had studied Latin with her sons under Nicholas of Linköping and as a widow theology under Magister Mathias, who in turn had studied under the great Jewish convert and scholar Nicholas of Lyra in Paris and who knew Hebrew. Much later, in Rome, the hermit Bishop Alfonso of Jaèn, whose brother had founded the Hieronymite Order - after the manner of Jerome's eremiticism - and which he had joined, assisted Birgitta with her continuing work on her massive Revelations, a visionary work modeled on the Apocalypse in which Birgitta recounted her visions and prophecies given her by Christ and the Virgin Mary.(33) Alfonso, as a Hieronomyte, was familiar with the letters written by Saints Jerome and Paula from Bethlehem and knew that Paula had studied Hebrew in order to assist Jerome in his translation of the Bible and had written ecstatically of her pilgrimage made with her daughter Eustochium to the Holy Places. Even the painting of Saint Jerome, now in London's National Gallery, but from this Order's monastery of San Girolamo in Fiesole, is a double portrayal, representing as well the widowed Birgitta and her beautiful virgin daughter Catherine of Sweden in its depictions of Saints Paula and Eustochium.

Eventually Birgitta under the guidance of Bishop Alfonso and her household (with the exception of her favorite son Charles who had died in Naples, after being the lover of Queen Johanna of that kingdom), went to Bethlehem and Jerusalem in the last and seventieth year of her life, fulfilling her youthful wish and vow made to the Virgin years ago in Sweden. For Alfonso as Hieronomyte this pilgrimage certainly resonated with that made by Jerome's companions, the noble Roman lady Paula and her daughter Eustochium, since Catherine accompanied her mother Birgitta as had Eustochium accompanied her mother Paula.(34) Birgitta's visions at Bethelehem in the cave of the Nativity and at Jerusalem's Calvary are clearly modeled on the affective piety of those Jerome recounted that Paula had had a thousand years earlier in those sacred places.(35)

Margery Kempe embarrassingly copied those visions of Paula and Birgitta, their affective piety, their 'theatre of devotion,' their quasi-visions, and their pilgrimages, journeying to Compostela, Rome, and Jerusalem, and she was to have them, too, be written down in her Book, the Book of Margery Kempe.(36) In that book she also wrote of her discussion of her hysteria and of her visions with Dame Julian of Norwich.(37) Interestingly, too, the anchorite Julian of Norwich, through the great Hebrew scholar, Cardinal Adam Easton from Norwich Priory, may have had access to Hebrew.

Thus we can hear women's voices dialoguing across space and time: Egeria writing from Israel and Constantinople to her nuns in Spain; Paula and her daughter Eustochium writing from Bethlehem to Marcella in Rome; Birgitta writing and Catherine in Jerusalem telling their account to Bishop Alfonso for all of Europe; Margery in England remembering hers to her scribes and to Julian. What has granted these women access to the sacred written word - which transcends time and death - has been their amalgamation of sacred history and sacred geography by means of their pilgrimages with their physical bodies with that Bible in their hands. Egeria and Paula and Eustochium were to write of their pilgrimages in epistles, in letters. Birgitta and Margery were to write of their pilgrimages in whole books, as though Bibles brought up to their date and rewritten for their gender. A Roman Empress, Helena, assisting Christianity, the religion of slaves and women, gave to the West, and especially to its pilgrimaging women, this matrix and translatio studii of Hebraism and its Book, shifting the center of culture from Athens, Alexandria, Rome and Constantinople to Jerusalem.

Notes

This paper was originally given with my slides of the Holy Land pilgrimage, including dawn from Mount Sinai, at 'The Woman and the Book' Conference, St Hilda's College, Oxford.

1.The Life of Constantine, chapters XXV-XL, in Eusebius, Church History, Life of Constantine the Great and Oration in Praise of Constantine, ed. Henry Wace and Philip Schaff (Oxford: Parker, 1890), Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, I: 526-530.

2. John Wilkinson, Egeria's Travels (London: S.P.C.K., 1973); CETEDOC Library of Christian Latin Texts (Turnholt: Brepols, 1991), compact disk, from Thesaurus Patrum Latinorum/CLCLT.CD; The Pilgrimage of St. Sylvia of Aquitania to the Holy Places (London: Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society, 1896), I; also `Peregrinatio Aetheriae,' Egeria: Diary of a Pilgrimage, trans. George E. Gringras (New York: Newman Press, 1970). Wilkinson, pp. 240-241, notes that St. Ambrose in 395 is the first to speak of Helena as finding the True Cross, Eusebius, Egeria and Crysostom not doing so.

3.Eusebius, chapters XLII-XLVII, pp. 530-532.

4. Wilkinson, pp. 91-98; CETEDOC CLCLT.CD.

5. The text goes on to add: 'The children of Israel marched for three days, thirsty and without water; and when they murmured, and the Lord made Moses bring abundance of water out of the hard rock, the hearts of those men remained ungrateful. She at that place thirsted for the Lord, and in her heart a fount of living water sprang up into life eternal. That multitude hungered, and by God's dispensation received the holy manna coming down from heaven. But even then they despised it, and longed for the accursed food of Egypt. She at that very place was refreshed by the Word of God, and, giving him unwearying thanks, went on her way without fear. They, many times hearing God's voice, could see his grace going before them by day and night in the pillar of cloud and fire; yet still they doubted, and thought to retrace their steps.' The text resonates with the monastic morning psalm, 95, and with the Exultet of the Pascal Candle.

6. Wilkinson, pp. 175-6. The letter goes on to say, pp. 177-178: 'We cannot but blush at this woman, dearest brothers - we in the full enjoyment of our bodily health and strength. Embracing the example of the holy Patriarch Abraham, she transformed the weakness of her sex into an iron strength, that she might win the reward of eternal life; and while, compassed about with her weakness, she trod this earth, she was obtaining paradise in calm and exultant glory. Though a native of Ocean's western shore, she became familiar with the East. While she sought healing for her own soul, she gave us an example of following God which is marvelously profitable for many. Here she refused rest, that she might with constancy attain to eternal glory and bear the palm of victory. Here she inflicted material burdens on her earthly body, that she might present herself irreproachable, a lover of heaven to heaven's Lord. Here, by her own will and choice she accepted the labours of pilgrimage, that she might, in the choir of holy virgins with the glorious queen of heaven, Mary the Lord's mother, inherit a heavenly kingdom.'

7. Wilkinson, p. 94. Egeria typically speaks of receiving communion after making her offering, and she also speaks of being given `blessings' by the monks. Early Christians brought with them offerings of bread and wine, in so doing symbolizing themselves as the Body of the Church, of Christ, the early Eucharist being solemnized by the Bishop and served by the Deacons back to the Congregation, all functioning as the Royal Priesthood to Christ as the High Priest, represented by the Bishop. Christians also took the blessed bread into their homes to use as the reserved sacrament during the week: Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1945), passim. In the Coptic church in Africa, the Korban or Mass is deeply centered upon the bread, again called the Korban, which is baked in an oven by the church the day of the Mass as small round loaves marked with crosses, one loaf being chosen out of several for the Korban itself, the remainder, called in Primitive Christianity and so called by Egeria, 'blessings,' being given to the congregation at the conclusion for them to take home: H.V. Morton, Through the Lands of the Bible (London: Methuen, 1938), pp. 168-77 and plate between pp. 344-345. Sometimes, however, the `blessings' given to Egeria can be fruit grown by the monks in their gardens. I should like to add that at Sinai our priest guide had no wafers and I suggested he use the round leavened Egyptian brown loaves we had for supper - and he did and preached a sermon on them.

8. She also visited the next mountain which the monks said was Horeb and tells the 'reverend ladies my sisters,' her fellow nuns back on the Atlantic coast in Spain: 'This is the Horeb to which the holy Prophet Elijah fled from the presence of King Ahab, and it was there that God spoke to him with the words, 'What doest thou here, Elijah?', as is written in the Books of the Kingdoms. Indeed, whenever we arrived, I always wanted the Bible passage read to us.' Wilkinson, p. 95.

9. Wilkinson, p. 106.

10. Wilkinson, p. 96.

11. That pilgrim knowledge of African topography was to deeply influence European culture. Dante's Mount Purgatorio even is modeled on the Mount Sinai of the medieval pilgrims.

12. Let me give an example of her style: 'This holy presbyter said to us, 'You see these foundations. . . . they were part of Melchizadek's palace. . . . That is the road by which holy Abraham returned . . . from Sodom, and it was on that road that he was met by holy Melchizadek, king of Salem.' Then I remembered that according to the Bible it was near Salem that holy John baptized at Aenon. So I asked [about it] . . . . 'There it is', said the holy presbyter. . . . 'If you like we can walk over there. It is from that spring that the village has this excellent supply of clean water you see'. . . . We set off. He led us along a well-kept valley to a very neat apple-orchard, and there in the middle of it he showed us a good clean spring of water which flowed in a single stream. 'This garden', said the holy presbyter, 'is still known in Greek as Cepos tu agiu Iohanni, or in your language, Latin, 'St John's Garden'.' The priest went on to speak of Easter baptisms there as still performed in that garden spring, the candidates then proceeding to the church called Opu Melchisadech in a procession by torchlight, singing psalms and antiphons, and accompanied by the clergy and the monks. Wilkinson, pp. 110-111.

13.It was discovered there in 1884 by J.F. Gamurrini and published by him in 1887. It was translated the following year into Russian and in 1891 into English: Wilkinson, p. 7. It is not without interest that Arezzo has the Piero della Francesca cycle of frescoes concerning St. Helena's Discovery of the True Cross.

14. Wilkinson, p. 179.

15. Wilkinson, pp. 194-200.

16. Wilkinson, pp. 112, 119-120, 121-123, at which she meets again her friend and acquaintance the deaconness Marthana to her great surprise and joy.

17. Wilkinson, pp. 112, 119-120, 121-123, 123.

18. Wilkinson, p. 123.

19. The Primacy of Peter, Bishop of Rome, was constantly under threat to that of James, Bishop of Jerusalem: Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, p. 176. It was to counter that threat by claiming to this day that the Jacobites are Monophysite heretics. Nevertheless later Spain's Compostela would lay claim to the body of Saint James in order to foster its great western pilgrimage and Reconquista of that land from Muslim hegemony. Beatus' Apocalypse likewise has much to do with instituting the Reconquista. It is interested that the pivotal text is one that places Rome as Babylon in an adversarial position to Jerusalem. See John Williams, Early Spanish Manuscript Illumination (New York: Braziller, 1977). Compostela's Galician clergy, because of James' Primacy, claimed special privileges not accorded to those of Rome. I found the Franciscans, as Custodians of the Holy Places, tended to disparage the Byzantine side of Jerusalem, as, for instance, in Sabino de Sandoli, The Peaceful Liberation of the Holy Places in the XIV Century (Cairo: Franciscan Center of Christian Oriental Studies, 1990). Yet one can also find in such a work as Stephen Graham's With the Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem that these Jerusalem liturgical practices were revered by the Greek and Russian Orthodox and continue into our own century, liturgy having about it an extraordinary conservatism. See Stephen Graham, With the Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem (London: Nelson, n.d.); Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).

20. Wilkinson, pp. 123-147; The Catechetical Lectures of Saint Cyril, Archbishop of Jerusalem, trans. John Henry Newman (London: Smith, 1885), in A Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church, Anterior to the Division of the East and West, Translated by Members of the English Church.

21 Wilkinson, pp. 172-173. Besides Egeria's and Cyril's texts we also have the contemporary Old Armenian Lectionary, and between the three texts it is possible to study the fourth-century Jerusalem liturgy almost in full: Wilkinson, pp. 253-277.

22. Wilkinson, p. 167.

23. Mgr. F. Lagrange, St. Paula, trans. The Benedictines of Talacre (London: Washbourne and Bogan, 1934); Cardinal Rampolla, The Life of St. Melania, trans. E. Leahy, ed. Herbert Thurston (London: Burns and Oates, 1908).

24. Ubi sunt latae porticus? ubi aurata laquearia? ubi domus miserorum poenis et damnatorum labore vestitae? ubi instar palatii, opibus privatorum extructae basilicae, ut vile corpusculum hominis pretiosius inambulet et quasi mundo quicquam possit esse ornatius, tecta magis sua magis quidquam velit aspicere, quam caelum? Ecce in hoc parvo terrae foramine, caelorum conditor natus est, hic involutus pannis, hic visus a pastoribus, hic demonstratus a stella, hic adoratus a Magis . . . In Christi vero . . . villula tota rusticitas, et extra psalmos silentium est. Quocumque te verteris, arator stivam tenens, alleluia decantat. Sudans messor Psalmis se avocat, et curva attondens vitem falce vinitor aliquod Davidicum canit. Haec sunt in hac provincia carmina, hae, ut vulgo dicitur, amatoriae cantationes. Hic pastorum sibilus, haec arma culturae. Verum quid agimus, nec quid deceat cogitantes, solum quod cupimus hoc videmus? Epistola XLVI, Patrologia Latina, ed. J.P. Migne (Paris, 1854), 22.490-91; The Letter of Paula and Eustochium to Marcella about the Holy Places (365 A.D.), trans. Aubrey Stewart (London: Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society, 1896); CETEDOC CLCLT.CD.

24 That knowledge will go on to influence not only the Kabbala but also such texts as Dante's Vita Nuova which shapes its 42 chapters upon the meanings of the names of the 42 Stations of Exodus.

25. The biographical details can be gleaned from Jerome's Epistles, Patrologia Latina, 22, ed. J. P. Migne, especially Epistola CVIII. See also J. N. D. Kelly, Jerome: His Life, Writings, and Controversies. It is interesting that all three pairs of letter writers, Paula and Jerome, Lioba and Boniface, Heloise and Abelard, were to be buried together, as if married couples; which was also true of Saints Scholastica and Benedict.

26. It is published in Patrologia Latina cursus completus, ed. Migne, 22.490-491; Saint Jerome, Lettres, ed. Jerome Labourt (Paris: Societe d'editions "Les Belles Lettres," 1951), II.100-114, and in English translation, The Letter of Paula and Eustochium to Marcella about the Holy Places (365 A. D.), trans. Aubrey Stewart (London: Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society, 1896); it is omitted from Select Letters of St. Jerome, trans. F. A. Wright (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), Loeb Classical Library 262.

27. Epistola CVIII, PL, ed. Migne, 22.490-491; trans. Aubrey Stewart (London: Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society, 1896), who notes that the earliest manuscript is eleventh century. Jerome in it commissions Paula's tomb in Bethlehem, stating of it, `Exegi monumentum aere perennius,' quoting Horace's Ode.

28. CETEDOC CLCLT.CD, Epistola XXII," 'et ille, qui residebat: 'mentiris', ait, 'Ciceronianus es, non christianus; ubi thesaurus tuus, ibi et cor tuum.'')

29. Epistola CVIII. The experience of women pilgrims is so intense that it is expressed as if it were hallucinatory, for instance, with Paula, with Birgitta of Sweden, with Margery Kempe. See Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), for a partial explanation. However, see also the Christian meditative tradition as exemplified by Jerome, and continued in Pseudo-Bonaventure, Meditations on the Life of Christ and St. Ignatius Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, which requires the imaginative participation in the events of the sacred drama as a form of prayer.

30. 'Mirabilis ardor, et vix in femina credibilis fortitudo. Oblita sexus et fragilitatis corporae, inter tot milia Monachorum cum puellis suis habitare cupiebat.'

31. Jerome's Letter to Eustochium and Adversus Jovinianum, PL, ed. Migne, 23.221-354.

32. Johannes Jørgensen, Saint Bridget of Sweden, trans. Ingeborg Lund (London: Longman's Green, 1954); Birger Gregersson and Thomas Gascoigne, The Life of Saint Birgitta, trans. Julia Bolton Holloway (Toronto: Peregrina Publishing, 1991).

33. The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen (London: Oxford University Press, 1940/1961), Early English Text Society, Original Series, 212.

33. As noted in The Myroure of oure Ladye, ed. John Henry Blunt (Oxford: Early English Text Society, Extra Series 19, 1873, rprtd. New York: Kraus, 1981), pp. 19-21; Julia Bolton Holloway, Saint Bride and her Book: Birgitta of Sweden's Revelations (Newburyport: Focus, 1992), passim. These devotional practices can be traced from Jerome and Paula, through the Pseudo-Bonaventure, Meditations on the Life of Christ, to Ignatius Loyola, Spiritual Exercises.

34. A Brigittine manuscript, now Lambeth Palace 432, strongly emphasizes the influence of Jerome upon Birgitta and speaks of Paula and Eustochium. The cave where Jerome, Paula and Eustochium lived and translated the Vulgate Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin adjoins that of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the sight of near-identical visions by Paula and by Birgitta.

The Botticelli of Jerome, Paula and Eustochium, today in London's National Gallery, came from convent of San Girolamo, Fiesole, a convent which has Brigittine associations. The portraits of the two ladies are clearly also of Birgitta and her most beautiful daughter Catherine.

35. Jerome, Epistola 108.

36. See Gail McMurray Gibson, "St. Margery: The Book of Margery Kempe," The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 47-65, 190-194; Gunnel Cleve, 'Margery Kempe: A Scandinavian Influence in Medieval England?' The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium V, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 163-78.Julia Bolton Holloway, "Bride, Margery, Julian and Alice: Bridget of Sweden's Textual Community in England," Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York: Garland, 1992), pp. 203-222.

37. Pp. 42-43.

Return to the Juliansite Homepage.

Book Reviews. Submissions Encouraged.

Further Bibliography. Submissions Encouraged.

The Julian Library Portfolio, 1996.
© Copyright Julia Bolton Holloway (juliana@tin.it), Fiesole
Website design: Timothy E. Thompson (tethomps@syr.fi.it), Florence
Webmaster: Otfried Lieberknecht (lieberk@berlin.netsurf.de), Berlin
Nota Bene Consultant: Tony St Quintin (tsq@nb-uk.win-uk.net), Leeds

This site last updated 2 November 1998.