EGERIA. THE PILGRIMAGE of EGERIA: A treatise narrating the journey of a devout woman to Egypt, the Holy Land, Edessa, Asia Minor, and Constantinople, prob. in 381–4. She is traditionally thought to have been a nun or abbess, perhaps from Spain or more probably Gaul; she certainly had considerable intelligence and powers of observation. In the first part, she records her identification of various places and scenes en route with the sites of biblical events, e.g. Moses’ brook, the place where the Golden Calf was made, the city of Melchizedek (‘Sedima’). In the latter part the descriptions are mainly of liturgical matters, esp. the services at Jerusalem and in the neighbourhood. They include accounts of the daily and Sunday offices, Epiphany (including the Night Station at Bethlehem), Holy Week and Easter (including the procession with palms to the Mount of Olives and the Veneration of the Cross), and Whitsuntide, in all of which Egeria had evidently taken part. It becomes clear that in her time in Egypt and at Jerusalem the Feast of the Nativity was kept on 6 Jan. She is also the earliest writer to mention the Feast of the Purification (here 14 Feb.).

The text is preserved (apart from a few fragments also contained in a Madrid MS) in a single 11th cent. MS which was discovered by F. Gamurrini at Arezzo in 1884. Gamurrini held the writer to be St Silvia, the sister of the Roman prefect, Rufinus, and hence the document came to be known as the ‘Peregrinatio Silviae’. In 1903, however, Dom M. Férotin argued that she was very probably to be identified with one Egeria (or, as he thought, Etheria), referred to by Valerius, a 7th cent. monk of the region of El Bierzo in N. Spain, and this identification is now very widely accepted. The ‘Peregrinatio’ is written in a curious Latin dialect, though how far this is a local form is disputed.

Edns. by J. F. Gamurrini (Rome, 1887), J. H. Bernard (London, 1891), P. Geyer (CSEL, 1898), H. Pétré (SC 21; 1948), O. Prinz (Heidelberg, 1960), A. Franceschini and R. Weber, OSB, in Itineraria et Alia Geographica (CCSL 175; 1905), pp. 29–103, and, with Fr. tr., by P. Maraval (together with letter of Valerius, ed. and tr. M. C. Díaz y Díaz, SC 296; 1982), with bibl. Eng. trs., with notes, by G. E. Gingras (ACW 38 [1970]) and J. [D.] Wilkinson, (London, 1971; 3rd edn., Warminster, 1999). F. Cabrol, Étude sur la Peregrinatio Silviae (1895); M. Férotin, ‘Le Véritable Auteur de la Peregrinatio Silviae. La vierge espagnole Éthéria’, RQH 74 (1903), 2, pp. 367–97; A. Bludau, Die Pilgerreise der Aetheria (1927); P. Devos, SJ, ‘La Date du Voyage d’Égérie’, Anal. Boll. 85 (1967), pp. 165–94; id., ‘Égérie à Bethléem. Le 40^e jour après Pâques à Jérusalem, en 383’, ibid. 86 (1968), pp. 87–108; E. Lamirande, ‘La pélerine Égérie’, Église et Théologie, 15 (1984), pp. 259–91; H. Sivan, ‘Who was Egeria? Pilgrimage and Piety in the Age of Gratian’, HTR 81 (1988), pp. 59–72; E. D. Hunt, ‘The Itinerary of Egeria’, in R. N. Swanson (ed.), The Holy Land, Holy Lands, and Christian Antiquity (Studies in Church History, 36; 2000), pp. 34–54. Atti del Convegno Internazionale sulla Peregrinatio Egeriae nel centenario della pubblicazione del Codex Aretinus 405 …: Arezzo 23–25 ottobre 1987 (Arezzo [1990]). M. Starowieyski, ‘Bibliografia Egeriana’, Augustinianum, 19 (1979), pp. 297–318. A. Hamman in Quasten (cont.), Patrology, 4 (1986), pp. 558–62.

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