other · 383 · Mount Sinai
She was a woman of some means from the far west — Gallaecia or Aquitaine — travelling for three years in the 380s with letters that got her military escorts through the frontier zones, which suggests connections. On Sinai she went up with the monks who lived on the mountain, and the pattern she records is the one that makes her valuable: at each place, the relevant passage was read aloud, a psalm was sung, and a prayer was said. That is a liturgy of place, and she is the first person to describe it. Her Latin is late, colloquial and full of constructions that made nineteenth-century editors unhappy, which is exactly why philologists prize it. The manuscript was found at Arezzo in 1884 and is missing both ends.
To see the places where the things in the Bible happened, and to write it down for the women at home.
The earliest surviving account of Christian pilgrimage, in the plain Latin of somebody who was not writing literature.