The Imperial Church Era · c. 382–420 CE · Rome & Bethlehem
You can sit down with this tradition now.
In the early 380s, Jerome arrived in Rome and joined a circle of ascetic, scripturally serious women already meeting around the widow Marcella on the Aventine. Paula, another widow, and her daughters Blaesilla and Eustochium belonged to the same circle, and all of them took Jerome as their teacher — a caustic, brilliant scholar with a gift for making enemies. In 384 Blaesilla took up the severe fasting Jerome taught and was dead within four months; at her funeral a Roman crowd shouted for the monks to be thrown in the Tiber, and Jerome's own consolation letter to the grieving Paula admits he wept writing it.
Within the year Pope Damasus, Jerome's protector, was also dead, and his position in Rome had become impossible. Paula and Eustochium sold their estates, sailed east, and founded monasteries at Bethlehem — a house for men, houses for women, a hostel for pilgrims — with Jerome installed alongside to work. What came out of it was the Vulgate: a Latin Bible rendered book by book from the Hebrew rather than the Greek everyone was used to, against fierce criticism — in one North African town, a congregation nearly rioted when its bishop read the new wording of a single word in Jonah, and Augustine wrote across the sea to warn Jerome what unsettling a people's prayed-over text could cost.
Not one word any of these women wrote in her own hand has survived; what is known of them comes only through Jerome's letters, or through others describing letters now lost. In the community's last years, an attack tied to the Pelagian dispute set fire to the Bethlehem monasteries. Eustochium sent Rome a full account of it, and the pope who answered her praised the community for one thing above all — that they had never named the man behind it.