Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims: Ascetic Travel in the Mediterranean World, A.D. 300-800 (review)

Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims, a revised Princeton University doctoral dissertation, challenges the catchall term "pilgrimage" and illustrates the wide variety of religious travel found in the late antique world, travel that Dietz locates primarily in an ascetic context. The author opens her study with a contextualization of travel in late antiquity. After discussing the various modes of transport available (primarily sea travel and Roman roads), Dietz suggests that the Germanic incursions of the fifth century led to an increase in the number of people one would normally find on the Roman byways. She then problematizes the concept of pilgrimage. In late antiquity there was a wide variety of religious travel, and it is unhelpful to try to fit all of these journeys under an anachronistic umbrella of pilgrimage. She closes the chapter with a brief discussion of examples of early resistance to monastic wandering.

Three examples of late antique religious travelers are examined in chapter 2: Egeria, Orosius, and Bacharius, a Christian philosopher. Egeria according to Dietz was a female ascetic who was possibly the abbess of an Iberian convent. Her three-year journey through the Holy Land suggests an alternate form of monasticism centered on a life of perpetual pilgrimage. Orosius, a Spanish priest sent east by Augustine, is also located in this wandering milieu. Bacharius receives only a brief consideration at the end of the chapter, a fact made regrettable in that he may actually have been closer to Dietz's model of a wandering ascetic than either Egeria or Orosius.

The attack on wandering monks found in early monastic rules is the topic of chapter 3. Here the author argues that the denigration of wandering found in the texts suggests that this lifestyle was more prevalent than has been commonly recognized. Chapter 4 examines the role of selected female travelers in the development of Jerusalem as a religious destination. Here the focus is on women such as the Empress Helena, the two Melanias, and Paula. Chapter 5 turns to the various forms of travel found among the ascetics of the Iberian Peninsula from the fourth to the eighth centuries, and this is followed (chap. 6) by a consideration of how the Islamic invasion changed the face of religious travel to occupied Jerusalem. At the same time, the spread of the Rule of Saint Benedict as a monastic norm is credited with curtailing the wandering monasticism.

Although Dietz's study is important in showing how a label such as pilgrimage fails to capture the entire spectrum of religious travel in Late Antiquity, she succumbs to the same temptation by pressing her religious wanderers into a different model, that of ascetics who adopted "a life of permanent pilgrimage and journey . . . constantly journeying until they find their peace and stability in the world to come" (66). Without disputing the assertion that there were ascetic wanderers during this period, we should note that different interpretations could be drawn from many of the examples Dietz proffers. It is difficult, for instance, to see Egeria and Orosius as exemplars of permanent monastic wandering. In the author's own reconstruction, Egeria was probably a Spanish nun whose trip to the east represented an interlude in an otherwise settled life. She came from a convent, traveled, then returned in order to become the abbess of that convent. Her journey was worth writing about because it represented a spectacular break from her normal, stable routine. Nor is it easy to see Orosius as a wandering ascetic. His trip to the Holy Land was imposed upon him by Augustine, who needed someone to carry his epistles to Jerome and represent him at a council. Was this trip the outworking of a monastic life that placed wandering at its core, or was Orosius simply another example of that type of traveler who emerges in so many writings of this period, the letter carrier? Dietz uncovers a...