SOURCE: Holloway, Julia Bolton. “Women Pilgrims I: Helena, Paula, Eutochium, Egeria.” In Jerusalem: Essays on Pilgrimage and Literature, pp. 31-39. New York: AMS Press, 1998.

In the following excerpt, Holloway surveys the content of the extant text of Itinerarium Egeriae.

Around a.d. 417, 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.¹

Let me begin with Egeria where her surviving, mutilated manuscript has us begin, in view of Mount Sinai.² 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...