foundation · 386 · Bethlehem
Paula was a Roman senatorial widow of the Aemilii with an income to match, and she left it. She and Eustochium went first through Egypt to look at the monks of Nitria, then to Palestine, and settled at Bethlehem, where they built a hospice on the pilgrim road, three houses for women under Paula's own rule and one for men under Jerome's, and put the rest into books and copyists. That last part is why she is in a dataset about transmission rather than only in a martyrology: the scriptorium she paid for is where the Hebrew Old Testament was turned into Latin over the next fifteen years, and Jerome says so repeatedly. She died there in 404, having spent the estate, and was buried under the Church of the Nativity.
To see the places, and then to stop travelling.
Two communities, a hospice, and the library that made the Vulgate possible.