ABSTRACT
In a letter to Oceanus, Jerome describes the travels of a Roman widow named Fabiola. 'Rome was not large enough for her compassionate kindness. She went from island to island, and travelled round the Etruscan Sea, and through the Volscian province ... where bands of monks have taken up their home, bestowing her bounty either in person or by the agency of holy men of faith'. 1 Eventually, and I believe predictably, she sailed to Jerusalem. Though Jerome urged her to stay in the East, she instead wanted to resume her travels. Jerome described her as living out of her 'travelling baggage ... a stranger (peregrina) in every city'.2 Fabiola was living a religious life of wandering; she was living as an exile. She had not taken Jerome's advice, but followed another path, one that others before her, including other women, had also followed. She resumed her travels and left Jerusalem, eventually returning to her home in Rome. Once again we are told that she wanted to escape-she felt confined, and this time, against the advice of her Roman friends, she departed, going to Ostia with a wealthy widower and setting up a xenodocium-a hostel for travellers-which quickly became popular and, according to Jerome, attracted huge crowds. This short account of Fabiola's travels, her patronage of monks and her foundation ofaxenodocium opens a window for us onto the activity of monastic wandering. Fabiola was not alone in combining travel and monastic life into a particularly late antique form of spiritual expression. My intention here is to explore the origins of Christian religious travel in the West through a consideration of the intimate connections between monasticism and the development of pilgrimage. I would like to suggest that pilgrimage was the offspring of a peculiar form of a monasticism based explicitly on ascetic travel and wandering.
