other · 384 · Jerusalem
She stayed three years and watched. The result is an hour-by-hour account of the daily offices, the Sunday vigil, the Epiphany, Lent, and the services of the great week — where each was held, who processed where, what was read at which spot, and what the bishop did. Nothing else from the ancient world comes close: liturgical scholarship on this period is largely a matter of reading Egeria and arguing about her. And the manuscript is fragmentary, which the source note in this project records deliberately, because the temptation with her is to cite her for things the surviving leaves do not carry. She writes as a reporter, not a theologian, and the flatness of the prose is part of the evidence: this is what it looked like to somebody standing there.
To describe, for sisters who would never see it, what the church at Jerusalem actually did on each day of the year.
The single most important source for early Christian worship, and the reason anyone knows what the fourth-century Holy Week looked like.