The Pilgrimage of Etheria (Egeria)

[Facing page vii.

The Pilgrimage oj Etlu r;n.

i. THE NARRATIVE AND ITS AUTHORSHIP

THIS book was discovered by Signer Gamurrini in a MS. of the eleventh century at Arezzo, and he published it first in 1887 and again, in a correcter edition, in 1888. Three years later an English translation with text and notes, by Dr. J. H. Bernard, and an appendix on the topography by Sir C. W. Wilson, appeared under the auspices of the Palestine Pilgrims Text Society. In 1895 Dom Cabrol issued a treatise of some importance entitled Les Eglises de Jerusalem. Then came M. Paul Geyer's edition in 1898 in vol. xxxix. of the Vienna Corpus Script. Eccl Lat., who still further emended and elucidated the text. Up till that time Signor Gamurrini's conjecture that the authoress was Silvia of Aquitaine, sister of the Emperor Theodosius's minister Rufinus had been considered plausible, but had not been either corroborated or disproved.1 But in 1903 Dom Ferotin (Revue des questions historiques, vol. Ixxiv.) sought to identify her with the virgin named Etheria, mentioned

1 Another conjecture was put forward by Kohler (Bibliothtque des chartes, xlv. p. 141 ff.) in 1884 that she was Galla Placidia, daughter of Theodosius, who is said to have visited Jerusalem from Constantinople about 423; but this pilgrimage rests on an untrustworthy tradition, and the conjecture has never met with much acceptance from others.

by Valerius in a letter to the religious brethren of the Vierzo in N.-W. Spain, and his arguments have met with very general acceptance. In 1909, however, a detailed and determined attack upon his views was made by Karl Meister in the Rheinisches Museum, so far as the date and nationality of the pilgrim are concerned; but his arguments were in Monseigneur Duchesne's opinion1 successfully met and answered by the Abbe Deconinck (Revue Biblique, 1910) and others. No one probably now adheres to the theory that Silvia was the pilgrim. Meister himself agrees with the other scholars already mentioned who have identified her with the abbess named Etheria,2 to whom Valerius refers; he only disputes her date and nationality.

Dom FeVotin's theory, amounting almost to a certainty, was that she was a fellow-countrywoman of Valerius, who had visited the East towards the end of the fourth century, i. e. in the reign of Theodosius (f395). Valerius himself lived in the second half of the seventh century,…