Melania

Saint Melania the Younger (also called Melania Junior) was born in 383 in Rome into one of the wealthiest senatorial families of the late Roman Empire. Her father was Valerius Publicola and her mother Ceionia Albina; her paternal grandmother was Melania the Elder, already famous as a Christian ascetic and monastic foundress in the Holy Land. The family’s estates lay in Italy, Sicily, Spain, Gaul, Britain, and North Africa. Contemporary narrative, above all the Life written soon after her death by her chaplain Gerontius, presents her as drawn from youth toward prayer and toward her grandmother’s example of renunciation.

In keeping with aristocratic custom she was married at about fourteen to her cousin Valerius Pinianus. The couple had two children, a daughter who died soon after birth and a son who died in childhood. These losses, together with Melania’s wish for continence and poverty, led them to abandon secular ambitions. After Publicola’s death they began to sell or give away their properties, freeing large numbers of slaves and endowing churches, monasteries, and the poor on a scale that drew both praise and criticism. The Gothic threat to Rome around 408–410 prompted them to leave the city. They stayed in Sicily and then went to North Africa, where they were received by Augustine of Hippo and Alypius of Thagaste and founded monasteries while continuing to dispose of remaining lands.

Around 417 Melania, Pinianus, and Albina traveled via Egypt to Jerusalem. On the Mount of Olives Melania established a convent of nuns, which she directed, while Pinianus founded a nearby monastery for men. She lived under a severe rule of fasting, vigils, manual work, and study of Scripture, received pilgrims, and at times took part in ecclesiastical affairs. After Pinianus died about 431 or 432 she remained in Jerusalem, completing a church of the apostles and a martyrion. In the mid-430s she went to Constantinople, where she was received by the empress Eudocia and was associated with the conversion of her uncle, the senator Volusianus.

Melania returned to Jerusalem and died there on 31 December 439. She was buried in the oratory of her community on the Mount of Olives. She has been venerated as a saint in East and West from an early date; her feast is 31 December. Gerontius’s Greek Life, with a related Latin version, is the principal source. Later calendars remembered her as a model of aristocratic conversion, monastic foundation, and large-scale charity. She is sometimes counted among the Desert Mothers, though her mature life belonged to the monasticism of Jerusalem rather than the Egyptian desert.