other · 382–385 · Rome
Marcella was a widow of the Marcelli who had refused a second marriage to a rich consular and turned the family palace on the Aventine into something between a convent and a seminary — women of her own class living ascetically together, reading scripture, learning Hebrew. Jerome came to Rome in 382 in Damasus' service and taught there; his letters make it clear that she set the agenda and that her questions were the reason a good deal of his exegesis exists. When he left under a cloud she stayed and defended him, and twenty years later he addressed the Apology against Rufinus to her and to Pammachius. This event is deliberately not a foundation: the circle is older than the years given here, and nothing this project holds dates its beginning, so the span is the span of Jerome's Roman years and the note says so. She died in 410 of injuries taken when the Goths sacked the city, having convinced them she had nothing to give them because she had already given it away.
Nothing that needed starting — she had been living this way on the Aventine for years before anyone came to teach her.
The household that produced Paula and Eustochium, and the reason Jerome had an audience in Rome at all.