GRACE STAFFORD DPhil Candidate, University of Oxford Early Christian Female Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Saint Menas, Saint Simeon the Elder, and Saint Thecla 1 ABSTRACT Elite female pilgrims are some of the most celebrated and well-studied women of Late Antiquity. The narratives surrounding the travels of women such as Egeria or Paula con- stitute a large proportion of our knowledge about pilgrimage practice in general and have formed the focus for the study of gender and pilgrimage in particular. This bias towards famous literary sources and elite experience, however, obscures our understanding of the “normal” women who made up the majority of female pilgrims. This article seeks to redress this imbal- ance by integrating material and textual sources from three sites of early Christian pilgrimage in order to better understand the interconnected relationship women had with these shrines. Evidence from the shrines of Saint Menas at Abu Mina, Saint Simeon the Stylite the Elder at Qal’at Sem’an, and Saint Thecla at Seleucia show how gender could shape pilgrimage experi- ence and how sites recognised women as a specific visitor demographic and catered to their needs. This was achieved through the provision of narratives related to the dangers of pilgrim- age, segregated spaces, and products aimed at women to purchase. In a wider sense, it argues that many women in Late Antiquity had greater freedom to travel and move in public spaces than is often recognised and that this freedom was not necessarily dependent on marital or sexual status. KEYWORDS Pilgrimage, Gender, Archaeology “How dare you make such a journey? Do you not realise you are a woman, and cannot go just anywhere?” 2 This was the reaction of Arsenius, an anchorite living in Egypt in the fifth cen- tury, when a nameless virgin from Rome threw herself at his feet. The pilgrim . I would like to thank Ine Jacobs for commenting on successive drafts of this article, and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and suggestions. All errors, of course, remain my own. . Jean-Baptiste Cotelier, ed., Ecclesiae graecae monumenta. Vol  (Luteciae Parisorum: Apud Franciscum Muguet Regis & Illustrissimi Archiepiscopi Parisiensis Typographum, ), –. Translation by Benedicta Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection (London: Mowbrays, ), Abba Arsenius , pp. –. Diana Webb also uses this anecdote to begin her discussion of female pilgrimage in the Middle Ages (Diana Webb, “Women Pilgrims of the Middle Ages,” History Today . []: –). 251 Studies in Late Antiquity, Vol. , Number , pps. –. electronic ISSN -.©  by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://sla.ucpress.edu/content/permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/./sla.....