Egeria, Journey to the Holy Land PDF
Preview Egeria, Journey to the Holy Land
Brepols liBrary of Christian sourCes patristiC and Medieval texts with english translations The cry ‘ad fontes!’ has been a constant among theologians of every variety since the mid-twentieth century. This is no simple process. Each generation needs to engage with the ancient and medieval sources afresh in a great act of cultural, intellectual, and linguistic translation. More than reproducing an historical artefact or transferring it into a new linguistic code, it requires engaging in a dialogue with the text. One dialogical pole is to acknowledge the inherited text’s distance from us by reading it in its original language, the other is to explore what it says within our world and language. Here the facing-pages of text and translation express this. These editions respect the original context by providing the best currently available Greek or Latin text, while the task of stating what it says today is found alongside it in the translation and in the notes and commentaries. The process testifies to the living nature of these texts within traditions. Each volume represents our generation’s attempt to restate the source in our language, cognisant that English is now the most widely used language among theologians either as their first language or their adopted language for scholarly communication. Brepols liBrary of Christian sourCes patristiC and Medieval texts with english translations 1 EDITORIAL BOARD Professor Thomas O’Loughlin, Director Dr Andreas Andreopoulos Professor Lewis Ayres Dr Lavinia Cerioni Professor Hugh Houghton Professor Doug Lee Professor Joseph Lössl Dr Elena Narinskaya Dr Sara Parks Egeria, Journey to the Holy Land Edited and translated by Paul F. Bradshaw With the assistance of Anne McGowan F Cover image: Ebstorf mappa mundi © Kloster Ebstorf. Used with permission. The English translation was originally published by Liturgical Press, Saint John’s Abbey, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321, U.S.A., and is published in this edition by license of Liturgical Press. All rights reserved. © 2020, Brepols Publishers n. v., Turnhout, Belgium. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2020/0095/327 ISBN 978-2-503-59281-7 eISBN 978-2-503-59282-4 DOI 10.1484/M.BLCS-EB.5.122047 Printed in the EU on acid-free paper. Table of Contents Preface 7 Introduction 9 Text and Translation 13 Notes 99 Appendix 103 Bibliography 117 Index of Biblical References 119 Index of Modern Authors 121 Index of English Names of Persons and Places 122 Preface The Latin text of the Itinerarium adopted here is that of E. Franceschini and R. Weber (1965, CCSL 175), 27–90, any questions concerning particular variant readings being addressed in the Notes. The English translation is adapted from A. McGowan and P. F. Bradshaw, The Pilgrimage of Egeria: A New Translation of the Itinerarium Egeriae with Introduction and Commentary (Alcuin Club Collections 93), Collegeville, 2018, which sought to be more literal than other translations. I am enormously grateful to my co-author for her work on that original, and also for assistance towards this version. Needless to say, readers will gain further advantage by consulting the apparatus criticus of the Corpus Christianorum edition, and from the introduction and commentary included in The Pilgrimage of Egeria. Paul F. Bradshaw Introduction The Manuscript Only one incomplete eleventh-century manuscript preserves this account of a Western European woman’s journey to the Holy Land and surrounding region, although eleven short quotations from the text surfaced in a ninth-century manuscript from Toledo in 1909 and two further fragments were published in 2005.1 It is bound together with some works of Hilary of Poitiers (De mysteriis and fragments of a hymnal) in Codex Aretinus 405, and was once housed in the library at the Benedictine Monastery of Monte Cassino before finding its way to the library of the Pia Fraternità dei Laici in Arezzo, Italy sometime after 1532. It was rediscovered in the modern era by the Italian historian and archaeologist G. F. Gamurrini in 1884, who published it in 1887, and again in a corrected version in 1888. Since then there have been a number of further editions and translations into several languages. The work carries no indication of its title, if there ever were one, nor of its author, nor any explicit reference to her place of origin or the date of the journey. It falls into two distinct halves, the first being a travel diary proper (chapters 1–23), the second a detailed description by the same author of the daily services and liturgical year at Jerusalem (24–49). The abruptness of the transition between the two parts, together with the second half being out of the chronological sequence of the journeying, suggests that they were originally separate documents that were united by someone else. As it stands, the manuscript is made up of three quires or quaternions (gatherings of four folded sheets forming eight folios or sixteen pages), which would originally have resulted in a total of forty-eight pages. Unfortunately, however, the middle of the three has lost its outer sheet, reducing it to six folios or twelve pages. This accounts for the two major breaks in the text, between 16.4 and 16.5 and within 25.6. In addition, the beginning and end of the document are obviously missing. If the extant manuscript did once have another complete quaternion preceding it, quite a substantial part of the original could be lacking. It is quite possible that some account of the author’s journey from home to Constantinople and then to Jerusalem, with a more extensive description of the city, occupied the beginning of the original text. Some sense of part of what was there can be gleaned from apparent citations found in Peter the Deacon, Liber de locis sanctis of 1137, although it is not always simple to identify the precise passages drawn from this source.2 On the other hand, what might 1 See Appendix A, 104-06, below. 2 Weber (1965, CCSL 175), 91–103. See also McGowan and Bradshaw (2018), 16–17. 10 introduction have comprised the conclusion of the manuscript is unclear, as the author seems to have nearly finished her description of the liturgical year at Jerusalem at the point where the extant manuscript breaks off in mid-sentence. The Identity of the Author Gamurrini put forward the hypothesis that the author was Silvia of Aquitaine (330–406), based on a reference to a woman named Silvania mentioned in the Lausiac History of Palladius as someone who went with him to Egypt c. 388.3 Silvania was the sister-in-law of Flavius Rufinus, which would have given her imperial connections by association, since Rufinus was a prefect of Theodosius I, emperor from 379 to 395. Another early theory connected the document to Galla Placidia (388–450), a woman with even more direct imperial connections as the daughter of Theodosius I and Galla and the sister of Honorius and Arcadius.4 The third prominent candidate was the sanctimonialis (‘holy’ or ‘religious’ person) who was the subject of a letter written by a Spanish monk Valerius of Bierzo (or Vierzo) to his fellow monks at a Galician monastery toward the end of the seventh century for their spiritual edifica- tion.5 Férotin (1903) was the first to identify the ‘most blessed Egeria’ named in the opening lines of the letter with the author of the travel diary, a conclusion accepted as virtually certain today. Manuscript copies of Valerius’s letter present her name in various ways, including Etheria (Aetheria), Echeria, Eiheria (Aeiheria), and Egeria. Convinced that ‘Egeria’ must have resulted from a scribal conflation of Aetheria (or Etheria), a name attested in Spain and Gaul, with Egeria the Roman nymph, Férotin presented the woman’s name as ‘Etheria’, even though this spelling occurs only once in one manuscript. The oldest manuscripts favour the spelling ‘Egeria’, and this is the version that most scholars have settled on since the middle of the twentieth century. As with her name, so too her likely place of origin has generated multiple theories. Current consensus places her in northwestern Spain, and more specifically in the province of Galicia, typically because of Valerius’s letter. Most of the other theories situate Egeria in some part of France, although Italy and Britain have also been suggested.6 Her Status Speculations about Egeria’s identity are also tied to proposals about whether she was an ascetic and/or monastic woman. Because she speaks of those to whom she 3 Gamurrini was misled by a Latin translation of Palladius that referred to this woman as Silvia and presented her as the imperial minister’s sister. 4 See Kohler (1884). 5 See Appendix B, 107-15, below. 6 See Gingras (1970), 10–11; Sivan (1988); Weber (1990).
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