Claim to Fame:
Possibly a member of a religious order, Egeria made a three-year visit to the Holy Land and wrote down her observations in a book called Itinerarium Egeriae, or the Travels, somewhere between the fourth and seventh centuries
Birth and Dates:
We don't know when Egeria lived, but it was sometime between the fourth and seventh centuries A.D. Egeria was born somewhere in the western part of the Roman Empire, perhaps in Galicia, in modern Spain, or in in Massilia (Marseilles).
Discovery of her Manuscript:
While the beginning and end are lost, the middle part of Egeria's writing (Itinerarium Egeriae or The Travels) survived as the Codex Aretinus, which was copied at Monte Cassino in the eleventh century, buried and lost in a work by St. Hillary, and then discovered in 1884, by the Italian scholar C. P. Gamurrini, who found the manuscript in a monastic library in Arezzo.
The Name Egeria:
The name Egeria became standard in 1948. Before that the name was Aetheria and her writing was called Peregrinatio Aetheriae. Gamurini attributed the manuscript to St. Silvia of Aquitaine, possibly connected with the court of Emperor Theodosius the Great.
The Content of her Manuscript:
The name Itinerarium Egeriae applies only to the first twenty-three chapters of the extant text, in which Egeria describes the monks, holy places, and geographical points in her travels, including visiting Mts. Sinai, Nebo, Faran, Tabor, Eremus, and Elijah's mountain. In the second 26 chapters, Egeria details the liturgical practices of the church at Jerusalem.
