Eustochium of Rome, Desert Mother

Eustochium Julia of Rome (died 28 September 419/20)

Although the lives of the Christian hermits, ascetics, and monks, often known collectively as the "Desert Fathers," are very well known--think St. Anthony ("the Great") or Hilarion (whose biography was recorded by St. Jerome) or John Chrysostom ("golden mouthed")--there were Desert Mothers, too, including Eustochium of Rome, probably born around the year 368.

A mosaic of St. Eustochiu, St. Paula,
St. Jerome, and St. Eusebius in
Bethlehem, St. Jerome's Chapel,
Church of St. Catherine of Alexandria

The daughter of a Roman senator named Toxotius and his wife Paula, who was herself a member of a powerful and wealthy senatorial family (the family claimed descent from the legendary Greek warrior Agamemnon), Eustochium Julia was the third of the couple's four daughers: her older sisters were Blaesilla and Paulina, her younger, Rufina. (There was also a son, named Toxotius, like his father.)

After the death of Toxotius, about the year 380, Paula turned her attention to religion and became one of the followers of the the widowed Marcella, who had devoted herself to an ascetic life of prayer, charitable works, and mortification of the flesh. In 382, Jerome arrived in Rome and spent three years with Marcella, about whom I've posted earlier in the year. Paula and her daughter, Eustochium, put themselves under Jerome's spiritual guidance.

Despite the urgings of her paternal family, Eustochium dedicated her life to perpetual virginity in 384. Jerome's treatise on virginity, De custodia virginitatis, was addressed to Eustochium.

In 385, Eustochium traveled with her mother to the Holy Land; after Jerome's return in 386, they traveled with him to Egypt, studying the lives of Christian hermits. Returning to the Holy Land, Paula and Eustochium established a series of monasteries in Bethlehem, one of them housing Jerome, the other three for the many women who arrived to live with Paula and Eustochium.

Paula died in 404. but Eustochium stayed on, taking up the leadership role her mother had played. In 416/17, her institutions were attacked, Eustochium and her niece Paula (her younger sister's daughter) reporting on the devastation to Pope Innocent I, who responded that he "deplored the plundering, slaughter, arson, and every outrage perpetrated against the places of your church by the devil." In this case, however, the "devils" were not pagans but Jerome's enemies, the attacks probably instigated by John II, the bishop of Jerusalem.

Eustochium died about 419/20. Her niece, the younger Paula, assumed supervision of their monasteries in Bethlehem.

Eustochium's mother is recognized as St. Paula of Rome, Eustochium as St. Eustochium. And both are among the Desert Mothers.

An excellent biographical essay and the texts of all of Jerome's letters to Eustochium can be found at Epistolae: Medieval Women's Latin Letters by clicking here. And here is a letter attributed to Paula and Eustochium, addressed to Marcella.

And for an introduction to the Desert Mothers, I recommend Laura Swan's The Forgotten Desert Mothers: Sayings, Lives, and Stories of Early Christian Women.

Judy Chicago's Opening Night

Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party (opening night, 14 March 1979)

The Dinner Party,
place settings for Mary Wollstonecraft and Sojourner Truth

One of the most amazing and controversial second-wave feminist works is Judy Chicago's monumental, multi-media art installation, The Dinner Party.

In an effort to reclaim women's history--and to provide a counternarrative to canonical art memorializing the New Testament story of the Last Supper--Chicago decided to use the idea of a banquet to create her symbolic history of women.

Instead of women's usual roles on such formal occasions, preparing the meal, serving it, and then cleaning up the mess, Chicago conceived of an oversize banquet table with place settings for thirty-nine women. Their individual place settings, each one of which includes a unique and elaborate needlework runner, a sculptural dinner plate, utensils, and a goblet, are arranged on three sides of a triangular table, each side of which is forty-eight feet long. This table is set on top of what Chicago calls a "heritage floor," 999 porcelain tiles, each one inscribed with the name of another notable woman.

The place settings are arranged chronologically, each side called a wing. The first wing begins with the primordial goddess and ends with Hypatia of Alexandria. The second begins with Marcella of Rome and extends to Anna van Schurman. The first place setting on the third wing is for Anne Hutchinson, the last for Georgia O'Keefe.

Almost lost for want of a home, The Dinner Party is now permanently displayed at the Virginia A Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. The Museum hosts an incredible gallery for online viewing. Included is a history of the art work, a virtual tour of the piece, from entry banners, detailed looks at each of the place settings, a description and viewing of the Heritage Floor and seven Heritage Panels. 

If you can't go to Brooklyn, at the very least take the online tour today!

The banquet table, The Dinner Party

Update, 7 February 2018: For Sasha Weiss's extended retrospective on Judy Chicago's life and work, "Judy Chicago: The Godmother," published today in the New York Times Style Magazine, click here.

Update, December 2018: On a happy note, Judy Chicago is one of this year's Time Magazine "100 Most Influential People," with a brief essay by Jill Soloway, which you can access by clicking here.

And on a not-so-happy note, there are still people--particularly those self-identifying as Christian evangelicals, evidently--who find something to fear in the work of Judy Chicago. Although Chicago has made her home in Belen, New Mexico, for the last twenty-six years, living and working in the town of 7,000 (as well as establishing her arts organization, Through the Flower, there, hosting small exhibitions featuring the work female artists in New Mexico), some fearful town residents have objected to the idea of a proposed Judy Chicago museum there: "As Christians, we are for order, justice, security and protection,” in the words of just one such critic. “I’m for protecting the eyes of the innocent, especially the children.” Sigh. To read Simon Romero's "A Museum Honoring Judy Chicago, Star of Feminist Art? Not in This ‘Sleepy Little Town" (New York Times, 15 December 2018, click here.

Update, 19 September 2019: An interview with Judy Chicago, who has two current exhibitions (one in Los Angeles and one in Washington D.C.--the headline in the New York Times says it all: "Judy Chicago on Rescuing Women from Art History's Sidelines" (click here).

Update, 7 July 2021: The Fine Arts Institute of San Francisco has announced a new exhibition, "Judy Chicago: A Retrospective" (click here), "the first retrospective of her work" (28 August 2021-9 January 2022). Click here for an online view.

Update, 5 October 2021: Wow!!!! Here’s another “dinner party” I knew nothing about, Vanessa Bell and  Duncan Grant’s 1932 Famous Women Dinner Service! Check out the article in The Guardian noting a new exhibition by clicking here. On the art itself, the location of which was unknown for years, click here

Marcella of Rome: Pious Noblewoman, Nun, and Saint

Marcella of Rome (feast day, 31 January)

Born into fashionable Roman society in 325, Marcella devoted herself to a life of chastity, prayer, and service when her young husband died just seven months after their marriage. (Most of what we know about Marcella comes from Jerome, whose letter to Principia, on the occasion of Marcella's death, gives a fairly detailed account of her life.)

On her unusual dedication--for a woman--to crafting and living a monastic life, Jerome writes, "In those days no highborn lady at Rome had made profession of the monastic life, or had ventured--so strange and ignominious and degrading did it then seem--publicly to call herself a nun. . . . Nor was she ashamed to profess a life which she had thus learned to be pleasing to Christ."

After his arrival in Rome, Jerome was not much interested in meeting with, or in teaching, Marcella. But, he explains, 

she pleaded so earnestly, both in season and out of season . . . as the apostle says, that at last her perseverance overcame my reluctance. And, as in those days my name was held in some renown as that of a student of the scriptures, she never came to see me that she did not ask me some question concerning them, nor would she at once acquiesce in my explanations but on the contrary would dispute them; not, however, for argument's sake but to learn the answers to those objections which might, as she saw, be made to my statements. How much virtue and ability, how much holiness and purity I found in her I am afraid to say; both lest I may exceed the bounds of men's belief and lest I may increase your sorrow by reminding you of the blessings that you have lost. This much only will I say, that whatever in me was the fruit of long study and as such made by constant meditation a part of my nature, this she tasted, this she learned and made her own.

Jerome narrates the circumstances of Marcella's death in 410, during the invasion of Alaric the Goth, to Principia (I'm not quite sure why, because Principia herself was there--maybe because Jerome thought his second-hand account was superior to a woman's eyewitness knowledge of events?):

Meantime, as was natural in a scene of such confusion, one of the bloodstained victors found his way into Marcella's house. Now be it mine to say what I have heard, to relate what holy men have seen; for there were some such present and they say that you too were with her in the hour of danger. When the soldiers entered she is said to have received them without any look of alarm; and when they asked her for gold she pointed to her coarse dress to show them that she had no buried treasure. However they would not believe in her self-chosen poverty, but scourged her and beat her with cudgels. She is said to have felt no pain but to have thrown herself at their feet and to have pleaded with tears for you, that you might not be taken from her, or owing to your youth have to endure what she as an old woman had no occasion to fear. Christ softened their hard hearts and even among bloodstained swords natural affection asserted its rights. The barbarians conveyed both you and her to the basilica of the apostle Paul, that you might find there either a place of safety or, if not that, at least a tomb.

Hereupon Marcella is said to have burst into great joy and to have thanked God for having kept you unharmed in answer to her prayer. She said she was thankful too that the taking of the city had found her poor, not made her so, that she was no[t] in want of daily bread, that Christ satisfied her needs so that she no longer felt hunger, that she was able to say in word and in deed: naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return there: the Lord gave and the Lord has taken away;blessed be the name of the Lord.

After a few days she fell asleep in the Lord; but to the last her powers remained unimpaired. You she made the heir of her poverty, or rather the poor through you. When she closed her eyes, it was in your arms; when she breathed her last breath, your lips received it; you shed tears but she smiled conscious of having led a good life and hoping for her reward hereafter.

If she were born in 325, Marcella would have been in her mid-eighties when she died.

A highly romanticized image of Marcella of Rome's
confrontation with the Goths