Empariamo da questa gloriosa santa Brigida, che haveva tolto lo sposo celeste e lui la mandava hora in questo luogo hora in quest’altro.
Domenica Narducci to Caterina Cibo, 1533
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This volume is the result of a research question that originated in a conversation between the co-editors several years ago over coffee in a hotel café. We were discussing widows – Saint Birgitta of Sweden (1303–1373) and Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547), specifically – and the more we talked, the more parallels we noticed between the two women. Both were noblewomen with internationally influential connections; were passionate about Church reform; and were keenly engaged in the fashioning of their public personae. Birgitta was born to an important noble family with links to the Swedish-Norwegian royals; Vittoria Colonna to the powerful Roman family who were patrons to Petrarch and boasted numerous powerful ecclesiasts, most famously Pope Martin V (1417–1431). We began to ask ourselves: What influence might the Swedish saint – widow and prophet, pilgrim and noblewoman – have had not simply on Colonna, but on the many women writers of the Italian Renaissance? Were the “celebrity” women of the 15th and 16th centuries aware of her, her revelations, and her influence on the politics and culture of her day?
Our initial research in the coming months revealed a curious and patchwork scholarly history of Birgitta’s presence in the Italian tradition, although she lived in Italy for over twenty years, and died there at the age of seventy. Her texts circulated widely in Italy from the late 14th century to 17th century, with her Liber celestis revelacionum (or Celestial Revelations) copied in Italian scriptoria, translated into vernacular, and printed in several Latin and Italian editions, both per se and in different compilations and collections of texts. In the same centuries, an extraordinary number of women writers across the peninsula were publishing their work, including nuns, widows, wives, and single women. Of perhaps equal significance is that they published in all the dominant genres – dialogues, letters, prophecies, orations, poetry, and epic. As scholars have shown, including many with essays in this volume, in the 16th century alone, more than 200 women in Italy published their work, a number that by far surpassed that of other European countries.1
What role, we asked ourselves, did Birgitta of Sweden play in this revolutionary rise of women intellectuals in Italy, both secular and religious? What echoes might we find of the foreign widow in the history of the Italian Renaissance? The answer begins in Rome.
Echoes: Birgitta as Role Model
On the Festa di Santa Brigida in July 1432, Birgitta appeared in a vision to the Roman aristocrat Francesca Bussa dei Ponziani (1384–1440).2 Her appearance came at a moment of international emergency for the Church: the Council of Basel, convened to confirm the decrees from the Council of Constance nearly twenty years earlier (1414–1418), had gone terribly wrong. The Constance decrees ended the painful years of the Great Western Schism of the Church (1378–1418), declaring that the pope was subject to the General Church Council, which drew its authority directly from God.3 Moreover, the decrees required the convening of regular councils in the future to promote reform – something that Pope Martin V had agreed to only reluctantly. This erosion of papal power staged and confirmed by the conciliarists was certainly not good news for Martin, who, following his election in 1418, had tried to restore the papacy to its former glory. The ambitious pope had enough on his plate at home in Rome: notably, escalating conflicts between the city’s barons, including members of his own powerful family. Martin, however, would never have to face another council: he died before the start of Basel in July 1431. His successor, Eugene IV, was not nearly as shrewd a politician, and the participants at Basel found themselves at loggerheads.4 The papacy’s legitimacy was once again thrown into question.
It was in the middle of this political and religious crisis that Birgitta appeared to the Roman Francesca: “Greetings my beloved daughter, who finds herself in my condition,” she greets her.5 She herself once lived in the same world as Francesca, Birgitta explains, and she too was married. Positioning herself as Francesca’s spiritual mother, she offers the younger woman empathy and understanding born of their shared experience, and reassures the younger visionary that the Divine Word granted her the gift of grace despite having participated in an earthly marriage. “So, console yourself, gentle soul,” the Swedish saint urges. “If I was able to live a holy life, you should not doubt your gift.”6
Birgitta’s words are clearly meant to instill confidence and authority in the aspiring Roman saint, as she urges Francesca to follow in her visionary footsteps despite her marital status. Just as Birgitta did not shy away from speaking out against ecclesiastical authorities during the Avignon Papacy,7 Francesca should not hold back from acting on the authority endowed to her by God during her own era’s ecclesiastical and political crisis. As Birgitta tells her:
I devoted myself completely to the highest Creator, and there was nothing that could move me away from his love. I conquered all obstacles courageously. Justice and reason helped me because the true light illuminated me and clarified my understanding. A deep humility was rooted in my mind, and nothing could exist in me unless it had been renewed. As a foreigner and stranger, I was always taken care of. I possessed nothing transient, but always walked free, always steadfast in obedience, and I never strayed.8
Birgitta’s status as a “forestiera” was well-known to Roman citizens of the early 15th century. Born in Sweden in 1303, the Swedish “principessa” lived the second half of her life as a foreigner in a strange land: Italy. She died in the center of Rome, in the house of a Roman widow, Francesca Papazzurri, her friend and longtime host. She was thus a pilgrim in the original sense of the word: a resident of Rome, but without Roman citizenship. In Francesca’s vision, Saint Birgitta identifies herself as both a pilgrim in Rome, and a pilgrim in the most fundamental of ways: as a temporary guest on earth.9 Although Francesca is a member of the Roman aristocracy, she too is a “forestiera” – a temporary guest on earth, a woman speaking up in a world governed by men. It is this strangeness ... like Birgitta’s, which gives her the freedom to raise her voice.10 Birgitta concludes her sermon to Francesca with a reference to their common fate, as well as to the fate of the Church itself: “You see, we received this glory, which we possess for a reason, and it consists of far more than what you see. If you could experience even a hint of the joy within, you would be split in half and yet you would feel no pain”.11
This appearance by Birgitta comes in the middle of a cluster of revelations experienced by Francesca which are characterized by a clear political bent. The Roman visionary was keenly aware of the perilous moment in which the Church found itself following the Council of Basel: if the new pope, Eugene IV, did not act prudently, a new schism would tear apart the church. The imagery in Francesca’s vision underscores the catastrophe of schism through the suggestion that Francesca’s body will be split in half, the fate suffered by the schismatics of Dante’s Inferno.12 Embedded in the vision is an interplay between Francesca’s body and the body of the Church itself: while Francesca might risk her very life in the struggle to restore Rome as the center of Christianity, the destruction of her own body could never be as painful as the destruction of the church.
Birgitta the Fountainhead
Almost two hundred years later, in May 1608, Ponziani, who was by then known affectionately in Rome as “Francesca Romana,” was canonized. In anticipation of the grand celebration, the Basilica di Santa Maria Nova in Rome was officially rededicated to her, although the church had been known unofficially by the name Santa Francesca Romana by locals since the 15th century. It was where Francesca had been granted the oblate of the Olivetan order, and where the sisters in her congregation first gathered.13 It had a connection to Birgitta as well, as the burial place of Pope Gregory XI – the pope who returned the papacy from Avignon to Rome, and who held Birgitta in such great esteem it is reported he kept her portrait in his cell while she was still alive.14 When Francesca’s mortal remains were discovered a few decades after her canonization, in 1638, she too was buried in the church. As part of the costly renovation of the newly-rededicated Basilica di Santa Francesca Romana, the much in-demand Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) was commissioned to design the majestic confessional in polychrome marble that same year – an indication of Francesca’s continued importance in the centuries following her death.15
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, c.1647–52. Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome
Scala / Art Resource, NY
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Blessed Ludovica Albertoni, c.1617–74. Church of San Francesco a Ripa, Rome
Scala / Art Resource, NY
The public, grandiose celebration of saintly Roman women – through expensive artistic commissions, the publication of vitae, beatifications, and canonizations – was a conspicuous component of the Catholic Church’s program of reform at the threshold of modernity. Bernini’s sculpture of Saint Teresa in ecstasy in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria (1647–52; Fig. 0.1) as well as of the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni (1671–74; Fig. 0.2) in San Francesco a Ripa are among the best-known displays of idealized religious intensity in Baroque Rome. But they are not the only ones, nor are they the first. In the Birgittine convent on Piazza Farnese, once home to Birgitta and her fellows, we find a striking medallion in which Birgitta is represented in a similar state of ecstasy, with her eyes directed upward to Heaven. The medallion has been attributed to the Bernini school, and it is possible that it was even completed by Bernini himself, who also enjoyed the friendship and patronage of the exiled Queen Christina of Sweden when she lived in Rome.16
André Vauchez has described Saint Birgitta as the fountainhead for a virtual cascade of visionary women to gain prominence in the centuries after her death, and it is instructive to consider this appellation in the context of the Baroque impulse to represent holy women in moments of supreme religious ecstasy.17 Further to the medallion in the Casa di Santa Brigida, Birgitta was the subject of a dramatic multipart installation by Stefano Maderno in the early 1600s in the basilica of San Paolo fuori le mura where, according to popular legend, she had experienced an extraordinary vision while at prayer, in which the figure of Christ hanging on the cross turned his head and spoke to her.18 (Fig. 0.3) Maderno was also responsible for the moving sculpture of Saint Cecilia (1600, Fig. 0.4) in the Trastevere church dedicated to the saint. We might consider both of Maderno’s pieces as precursors to Bernini’s later celebrated sculptures of extreme religious devotion by holy women.
Stefano Maderno, Statue of St. Bridget, c.1590’s. Basilica of San Paolo fuori le mura, Rome
Image provided by Fondazione Federico Zeri, Università di Bologna
Stefano Maderno, Martyrdom of St. Cecilia, c.1599–1600. Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome
Manuel Cohen / Art Resource, NY
The Catholic Church of the 17th century celebrated saintly women such as Birgitta, Cecilia, Teresa, Francesca Romana and Ludovica Albertoni as handmaidens of true Christian faith in the period of restored confidence a century after the Reformation and Christianity’s dramatic split. Statues of the women, positioned around the city of Rome in what seems to be a most conscious program, staged the call for conversion evangelized by the expanding, colonizing Catholic Church not only in Europe, but across the world.19 In pondering the logic behind Birgitta’s prominence in this later evangelizing program, we might return to the vision of the “local” Roman visionary Francesca in the 15th century. Why is it the Swedish saint – a “foreigner and stranger” – who appears to Francesca in July of 1432, and not, for instance, Peter or Paul, the patron saints of Rome and those who appear most often in Francesca’s political revelations? Indeed, Birgitta is the only contemporary saint other than the celebrated Saint Francis of Assisi to appear in Francesca’s visions, depicted as a spiritual adviser or even a spiritual mother. Why did the author of Francesca’s visions – whether that author was Giovanni Mattiotti, Francesca’s confessor, himself, or Mattiotti and Francesca in collaboration – establish such a clear and intimate link between the two women?20
Birgitta’s Life
In answer to this question and the others before it, we must turn to Birgitta’s extraordinary life.21 She was born around 1303 in Uppland, Sweden. The daughter of Ingeborg Bengtsdotter of the powerful Folkung dynasty and the knight and lawman (lagman) Birger Persson, she belonged to the highest echelons of the nobility with close ties to the Swedish Norwegian royal family. Because of her aristocratic background, she is sometimes labelled a principessa in Italian sources – “a princess from the Kingdom of Sweden” – and throughout her long life she associated regularly with noble families throughout Europe.22 At thirteen she was married to Ulf Gudmarsson, five years her senior and a knight and lawman like her father. The couple settled at Ulvåsa, an estate near Lake Boren in Östergötland, and there Birgitta bore eight children.
According to the hagiographic sources, the saint in spe struggled to find the balance between the vita contemplativa and the vita activa before her husband’s death. To a degree, she lived a pious and ascetic life. Birgitta represented the new and more sentimental lay piety which characterized the late Middle Ages. In contrast to earlier centuries, where personal piety was primarily the realm of the clergy, by the 14th century lay people also observed the liturgical year: fasting, praying, reciting the rosary, celebrating holidays, and attending masses – and this was certainly true in Birgitta’s home.23 And yet Birgitta was probably a highly practical woman – a necessity in the running of a large medieval estate, with barns and stables, brewery, laundry, storehouse, loom house, and smithy. Despite a staff of servants, Birgitta took part in the work at Ulvåsa herself. This is at least the impression her later revelations give us: as scholars have argued, Birgitta’s imagery and prolific use of parables boast a robust and sensual realism, obviously inspired by the world that surrounded her.24 Her metaphors are taken from every aspect of human life, from agriculture, farming, trading, fishing, and mining, to breastfeeding, cooking, embroidery, and weaving. Moreover, Birgitta practiced her piety by taking care of people in need, such as beggars and prostitutes, and she organized the construction of hospitals, not only at Ulvåsa, but also around Sweden. She is even reported to have nursed patients herself.25
In the middle of the 1330s, Birgitta was called to the royal court in Stockholm, where she was made magistra for the young Queen Blanca of Namur, the wife of the Swedish king Magnus Eriksson. We do not know how long she stayed at the court, but she doubtless had a great influence on the royal couple. In the beginning it seems she felt affection for the young king, a relative through her mother. Over the years, however, she became frustrated with him, as is evident in her visions: according to Birgitta, Magnus was unable to fulfill his role as exemplary king. He surrounded himself with corrupt counsellors, she believed, and his foreign policy was bad; she was especially critical of the king’s disastrous crusade against Russia. Birgitta’s disapproval would grow over the years: from Rome, many years later, she organized a conspiracy to oust him.26
As the sources depict her, a unique air of authority characterized Birgitta from a young age; despite her lack of formal education, she was quite learned and possessed rare political insight.27 She was soon also a well-traveled woman. By the end of the 1330s, Birgitta and Ulf had gone on pilgrimage to Nidaros in Norway, and a couple of years later, they travelled across Europe to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. It was on their journey home from Spain that Ulf became sick, and he died not long after their return to Sweden. Thus began Birgitta’s “second career” as holy widow.28
Widowhood was alternately a privileged and vexed identity in late medieval Europe.29 In the Middle Ages, there were a set of expectations for how a widow should behave, based on both Christian doctrine and societal practice. A widow’s principal duty was to preserve the memory of her husband on earth, and to pray for his soul to facilitate his way through Purgatory.30 This was specific to women who lost their husbands, of course: there were no similar expectations of widowed husbands, who could proceed in life without comparable worries. The widow, however, was expected to live an isolated existence, modeled on the biblical exemplum of Anna of Phanuel; a “true” widow’s days, in the model following Saint Paul, were taken up with fasting, praying, and little else. Birgitta’s response to these powerful, culturally ingrained expectations was swift, dismissive – and revolutionary. When Ulf died, she is said to have removed the ring he had given her on his death-bed declaring: “When I buried my husband, I buried with him all carnal love, and although I loved him with all my heart, I should not wish to buy back his life, not with the least money.”31
For the 43-year-old Birgitta, widowhood meant not isolation, but a new freedom and a new “career” as a prophet. Not long after her husband had passed away, Birgitta is reported to have received what is usually dubbed her “calling vision”:
After some days, when the bride of Christ was worried about the change in her status and its bearing on her service of God, and while she was praying about this in her chapel, she became rapt in spirit; and while she was in ecstasy, she saw a bright cloud from which she heard a voice saying to her: “Woman, hear me […] Fear me not,” he said, “for I am the Creator of all, and not a deceiver. I do not speak to you for your sake alone, but for the sake of the salvation of others. […] You shall be my bride and my channel, and you shall hear and see spiritual things, and my Spirit shall remain with you even until your death.32
Some scholars have argued that Birgitta should be considered a “visionary” or a “prophet” in the biblical sense, both of which are more gender-neutral terms than “mystic,” the label more commonly used to describe religious women with visions in the later Middle Ages.33 It is, of course, almost impossible to discern the difference, and Birgitta’s visions contained both mystical and prophetic characteristics. The most remarkable aspect of her calling vision is, however, its retrieval of the vocation of the prophets from the Old Testament. Rather than dictating an inner, spiritual journey culminating in her mystical union with God, the vision emphasizes Birgitta’s active role in the world’s salvation. As God tells her, he is not speaking for her sake, but for the salvation of others, and she shall be his sponsa et canale – his bride and channel.
While Birgitta never explicitly claimed the exalted title of “prophet”, she nevertheless managed, slowly but surely, to craft herself as one. This was a daring project, especially in the wake of the cruel fate suffered by the popular beguine movement of pious, religious women who had organized in collectives across Europe without taking monastic vows since the middle of the 13th century.34 Their chosen good works, such as teaching, evangelizing, and nursing, in addition to their ability to move freely around urban spaces without male control, caused a great backlash, and in 1317 Pope John XXII banned the movement. Women were forced to enter conventional convents to avoid the severe punishment some suffered, such as the visionary Marguerite Porete (1250–1310), who was burned alive. Because of these restrictions, Birgitta and her supporters had to be most careful in how they conducted themselves, and her enemies grew as her fame grew. According to the sources, she was attacked both in the street and at the royal court, and at a certain point it was deemed necessary to have her visions judicially examined. Was she a mouthpiece of God, or of the Devil? Archbishop Hemming Nilsson established a commission in Uppsala, probably in 1346, to investigate the legitimacy of Birgitta’s visions.35 The commission consisted of three bishops, a magister, and an abbot – all of them, according to Morris, powerful clerics in Sweden who were well-known to Birgitta. Despite the often deeply provocative content of her revelations, the commission ultimately recognized them as fully authentic.
From a proto-feminist point of view, it is not difficult to see how effective taking on the role of a prophet could be for a woman eager to influence the greater world, especially in an era when women were excluded from educational institutions, such as cathedral schools and universities. While monastic life did offer possibilities for women to pursue intellectual, practical, or artistic interests, women were still restricted from achieving any higher positions in the ecclesiastic hierarchy (as, of course, they still are by the Catholic Church today). Moreover, women were forbidden from preaching in public and from teaching men; regardless of social status and background, they were still subject to a strict and dominant gender hierarchy.36 By convincing many powerful people, including several European monarchs and princes, that she was a channel and vessel for divine powers, the “prophet” Birgitta and her supporters achieved a rare authority for her.
A few years after she received her calling vision and after the judgment by the Swedish commission, Birgitta went on pilgrimage to Rome. The aim of the trip was threefold: First, she went to take part in the Holy Jubilee of 1350, which had been proclaimed by the pope after years of suffering due to the plague. Second, in Rome she hoped to witness the pope and the Roman emperor together, as Christ had foretold in a vision she received while she was still living in Sweden.37 Third, she intended to obtain the pope’s approval for her planned monastic order, the Ordo sanctissimi Salvatoris. One of the most important visions Birgitta received in Sweden had instructed her to found her order: the Regula Salvatoris, which forms a part of her Celestial Revelations.38 Birgitta envisioned a double monastery, one for both women and men, but with a female majority, and ruled over by an abbess. Birgitta probably intended to be the first abbess at her planned monastery at Vadstena, Sweden, but her order was not approved until 1378, five years after her death. Following the order’s approval, however, Birgittine convents quickly popped up across Europe, including in the Netherlands, England, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Spain, Germany, and Italy.39
Birgitta’s Celestial (and Earthly) Revelations
After a long journey across plague-ridden Europe in fall 1349, Birgitta reached Rome shortly before Christmas, just in time for the opening of the Holy Jubilee. As a noblewoman, she was able to befriend members of the most powerful Roman families, and several of them would follow her faithfully throughout her life. The Revelations reveal her extraordinary network of correspondents – knights and friars, popes and cardinals, monarchs, and Italian noble families including the Visconti of Milan, the Acciaioli of Florence and the Colonna and Orsini of Rome – which places her at the center of the urban and courtly galaxies emerging at the threshold of the Italian Renaissance. Likewise, the subjects that preoccupied her – reform, political and social justice, the place of women in society – connect her to future generations of Italian reformers in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Birgitta quickly established herself in Rome as a prophetic activist with a far-reaching reputation. Her many visions show her engaged in contemporary, male-dominated debates over the escalating wars between England and France; the bloody conflicts among the Italian city-states; poverty in Rome; the slave trade in Naples; prostitution; simony; the corrupt nobility; and the equally corrupt clergy. The revelations are clearly the product of a sharp and subtle thinker with a sophisticated understanding of contemporary political and religious life, and she sent them as direct political interventions to the people concerned.
Among the myriad motives and subjects in her visions, two issues stand out as especially important in the Revelations. One is her advocacy for the thorough reform of the church: a moral rearmament of the faithful. The other is her attempt to persuade the papacy to return from Avignon to Rome. For Birgitta, the two issues were strongly connected: reform was impossible, she believed, until Rome was restored as the religious and institutional center of Christianity.
Birgitta was, of course, not alone in her belief in the urgency of a Roman political, spiritual and cultural renaissance. Birgitta’s contemporary Petrarch (1304–1374), also in Rome during the Holy Jubilee, claimed in a famous letter (Fam. VI, 2) that Rome could not rise again without embracing its past glory. Describing his walks together with his friend Giovanni Colonna around what he describes as a broken city (fracte urbis), Petrarch recalls Rome’s glorious past: “For who can doubt that Rome would rise again instantly if she began to know herself?”40 For Petrarch, the loss of history meant the loss of identity, and that identity could only be restored through the humanist project: the intellectual process of remembering and recovery. Birgitta expresses the very same idea in one of her visions from her early years in Rome:
O Rome, if you knew your days, you would surely weep and not rejoice. Rome was in olden days like a tapestry dyed in beautiful colors and woven with noble threads. Its soil was dyed in red, that is, in the blood of the martyrs, and woven, that is, mixed with the bones of the saints. Now her gates are abandoned, in that their defenders and guardians have turned to avarice. Her walls are thrown down and left unguarded, in that no one cares that the souls are being lost. Rather the clergy and the people, who are the walls of God, have scattered away to work for carnal advantage. The sacred vessels are sold with scorn, in that God’s sacraments are administered for money and worldly favors.41
The image of widowed Rome, the “new” widowed Jerusalem of Lamentations, was already a popular motif in political laments, used by authors such as Dante, Petrarch, and the Roman chronicle of the Anonimo Romano.42 Two years before Birgitta’s arrival, Cola di Rienzo had commissioned a series of frescoes during his revolution in Rome in 1347, which depicted the city as a mourning widow. While she had rejected the traditional role of mourning widow in Sweden, after her arrival Rome, Birgitta took on the role in a new way, as widowed Rome embodied, performing the city’s deplorable situation both in person and through the many letters she sent to Avignon and in which she energetically tried to persuade the pope to return as soon as possible.43
Birgitta followed the same pious and ascetic life in Rome as she had done at home. The members of her household, as well as the growing group of devoted pilgrims who visited her house on what is now Piazza Farnese, reportedly had to follow the same strict life as she did, with regular fasting, prayers, and duties. From what we know, however, Birgitta was probably also eager to be on the move. According to several witnesses who testified at her canonization process, she became a familiar face around the city. Every day and in all kinds of weather, the energetic woman would scurry around the streets to visit the churches and the many holy shrines of Rome.44 She visited the hospitals to care for patients and she helped the poor, sometimes by begging in the streets herself; in keeping with her vow of poverty, she had relinquished all her belongings to Magister Peter, one of her Swedish confessors.45
Birgitta was in perpetual motion throughout her long life. She was an eager pilgrim, and her pilgrimages continued after she settled in Italy. In the more than 23 years she lived in Rome, she went on pilgrimages across the peninsula, to holy shrines and sites such as Pavia, Assisi, Naples, Amalfi, Ortona and Bari, some several times. In May 1371, Christ reportedly told her it was the moment for a new and more ambitious pilgrimage: to the Holy Land (Rev. VII:6).
Niccolò di Tommaso, Saint Bridget’s Vision of the Nativity [center], c.1375–76. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA
The Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY
Birgitta’s experiences from this final pilgrimage are gathered in the seventh book of the Celestial Revelations. It is a remarkable book, in part because of the dense biographical details, such as her meetings with friars, knights and courtiers, encounters with Queen Joanna I of Naples and Queen Eleanor of Aragon in Cyprus, and the descriptions of the dangers and challenges of the long journey. The seventh book is also unique in the beauty of its text and the high aesthetic standard of some of the revelations. These include her two famous visions of the Crucifixion and the Nativity (Rev. VII: 15 and VII: 21; Fig. 0.5), which would have an important influence on Renaissance iconography, and which both reveal an author at the peak of her intellectual and imaginative potential. A painting by the Tuscan artist Niccolò di Tommaso (c.1373) depicting Birgitta in the moment she receives the vision in the Nativity cave in Bethlehem, is among the first extant devotional images of the coming saint.46 Perhaps the most striking aspect of the seventh book, however, is the intense and bold political tone of her revelations, which reveal both the authority and the reputation that Birgitta had achieved by the end of her life.
On her return from Jerusalem, Birgitta fell ill, like her husband had over three decades earlier on their return from Santiago. She was nearly 70 years old. After a longer stay in Naples, she returned to Rome, where she died in her house on a summer’s day, 23 July 1373.
Birgitta’s Legacy as Woman Intellect
Modern scholarship has focused almost exclusively on Birgitta as a product of Sweden, and an important bedrock of the visionary tradition of Northern Europe. But what about her impact on religious and secular culture, and on the women writers and thinkers who came after her, in her adopted home of Italy? Like them, including most prominently her admirer Catherine of Siena, she was an intellect who operated almost exclusively in the vernacular.47 According to the sources, Birgitta wrote down many of her revelations in Swedish before having them translated by her male spiritual advisers into Latin, the language of the church. She was a stringent editor, and supervised these translations from Swedish to Latin with painstaking attention, as this famous passage from the canonization material explains:
The words that were given her from God she wrote down in her mother tongue with her own hand when she was well and she had us, her father confessors, make a very faithful translation of them into Latin. She then listened to the translation together with her own writing, which she herself had written, to make sure that not one word was added or subtracted, but was exactly what she had heard and seen in the divine vision. But if she was ill, she would call her confessor and a scribe, especially appointed as secretary for this, whereupon with great devotion and fear of God and sometimes in tears, she spoke the words to him in her native language in a kind of attentive mental elevation, as if she was reading them in a book; and he wrote them down there in her presence. When the words had been written down she wished to hear them and she listened very carefully and attentively.48
This attention to detail on Birgitta’s part is especially important when we consider her multiple male scribes over the course of her prophetic career. The first to translate Birgitta’s revelations was her Swedish friend and confessor, Magister Mathias of Linköping. After Mathias’ death, the “two Peters” who accompanied Birgitta to Rome, Prior Peter Olafsson and Magister Peter Olafsson, became the main translators and transcribers of her revelations. They were also the authors of her vita, which would later constitute a significant part of her canonization process.49 However, it was her Spanish confessor, Alfonso Pecha (c.1327–1389), who came to be the most important translator, and later, the general editor of Birgitta’s revelations.
Alfonso Pecha, the former bishop of Jaén in Andalucia, was reportedly deeply impressed by Birgitta when he came to Rome in the late 1360s, and they soon initiated a fruitful collaboration. Due to his profound knowledge of canon law and his connections in the papal curia, Alfonso came to play a central role in Birgitta’s attempts to secure papal authorization for her monastic order.50 Moreover, Alfonso was a key figure in Birgitta’s canonization process, and it was he who at Birgitta’s request copied and organized her visions into the form known to us today, the eight books of her Liber celestis revelaciones.
Not long after Birgitta’s death, Alfonso established a scriptorium in Naples where her revelations were neatly edited and copied on expensive parchment and illuminated with acanthus vines and scenes from her life.51 In the spring of 1377, the first version of the Celestial Revelations was completed, consisting of seven volumes. The redaction was part of an extensive campaign for Birgitta’s canonization, and was presented to Pope Gregory XI along with a petition signed by a who’s who of European monarchs, including Queen Joanna of Naples, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, and Queen Margaret I of Denmark-Norway. The process was not a quick one. In addition to the time and effort it took to gather testimony on Birgitta’s many miracles and saintly acts in the Acta et processus, the process was further delayed by the Great Western Schism beginning in 1378, which led to two competing popes, even three for a period. It was in this troubled setting that the campaign for Birgitta’s canonization took place; her revelations arguing for the return of the papacy to Rome would be viewed with deep suspicion in the years following the Schism by ecclesiastical figures including the Chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean Gerson.52 In 1380, Alfonso was at last able to present a new and extended version of the Celestial Revelations, now including the eighth book, and on October 7, 1391, the canonization finally took place.
Birgitta’s canonization was the very first to occur in Rome in more than 100 years; the first since the return of the papacy to Rome from Avignon. It was thus an important moment for the Roman papacy to demonstrate its renewed power, and the celebrations in Rome were extravagant. No one had fought with more fervour and constancy than Birgitta did for the return of the papacy to Rome from its long exile in Avignon; for the reform of the church; and for the restoration of Rome as the political and institutional centre of Christianity. It was now time for Rome to celebrate the widowed pilgrim from the far north. According to the Vadstena abbey chronicle covering the period from 1344 to 1545, Diarium Vadstenense, on 7 October 1391, the cardinals and Church prelates met in the early morning in the pope’s palace, where, together with Pope Boniface IX, they entered the great chapel, which was decorated with light and torches and adorned with tapestries, the floor strewn with leaves and sweet-smelling herbs. From vespers the day before and throughout the whole day and night, the bells were rung in all the churches across Rome to mark the great event. After Pope Boniface IX’s sermon praising the blessed widow, which was followed by a series of antiphons, he declared the canonization finalized.53 Boniface granted indulgences to all who visited St. Peter’s and the monastery of San Lorenzo in Panisperna, where Birgitta was buried, on the day of canonization and the days following. On the second day after the canonization, the pope celebrated a mass in honour of Birgitta in St. Peter’s, where 30,000 lamps burned alongside a host of candles and torches from midnight until after the mass.54
Birgitta’s canonization was but the beginning of her legacy in Italy. In the decades following, her profile across the peninsula continued to grow. In addition to the popularity of her cult in Rome and in Naples, the first Birgittine monastery in Italy, the Paradiso in the Pian di Ripoli in Florence, was established in 1394. Paradiso was followed by the opening of other convents, such as Scala Coeli in Genoa (1406), and Santa Cecilia in Rome, which was entrusted to the Birgittines from 1419 to 1438 (of note, this was during Francesca Romana’s most fruitful years as a visionary across town).55 Meanwhile, Birgitta’s visions circulated in both Latin and Italian, and the Celestial Revelations were translated in their entirety into Italian by a follower of Catherine of Siena years before they appeared in other languages, including English, German, and Dutch.56 Manuscript evidence of her vita in the vernacular also suggests early interest; the Biblioteca Angelica in Rome, for example, is in possession of an early 15th-century manuscript which contains Italian translations of her miracles and part of the Sermo Angelicus alongside the Vita Sancte Brigide.57
Despite this textual evidence, there is not a great deal of scholarship that explores Birgitta’s influence in Italy. Most Birgittine scholarship has been connected to Sweden (e.g. Klockars 1976); to the Birgittine monasteries in Europe (i.e. Nyberg 1991; Gejrot e al. 2010; Sander-Olsen et al. 2013); to the saint’s place among late medieval holy women (i.e. Morris 1999; Sahlin 2001; Salmesvuori 2014); or to her late medieval legacy (i.e. Oen 2019).58 And yet, this important contemporary scholarship has revealed more of Birgitta’s life, work and reception, and suggests that she had a broader influence than previously explored. Conferences, anthologies, and monographs on Birgitta, alongside Bridget Morris’ recent translation and publication of her complete works in four volumes by Oxford University Press (2008–2015) and the significant Companion to Birgitta of Sweden, edited by Maria H. Oen (2019), testify to this attention, and this important new understanding of her impact.
Some have long pointed to Birgitta’s importance in Italy. The Swedish scholar Isak Collijn has done some fundamental research in Italian archives and libraries.59 Adriana Valerio has explored the Birgittine context in Naples, as well as Birgitta as a model for the 15th-century Florentine visionary Domenica Narducci.60 Ottavia Niccoli has briefly pointed to the presence of Birgitta’s voice in vernacular prophecy.61 Domenico Pezzini has examined a small number of the translations that were produced in the 14th and the 15th centuries, and which remain in unpublished manuscript form.62 Pezzini is one contributor to the slim anthology Santa Brigida, Napoli, L’Italia, edited by Olle Ferm, Alessandra Perricoli Saggese, and Marcello Rotili (2009) which explores the Neapolitan context.63 Moreover, the recent volume, Sanctity and Female Authorship. Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena (2020), co-edited by Oen and Falkeid, focuses on the intertwined lives and networks of Saints Birgitta and Catherine.64
The significant imprint Birgitta and her extensive oeuvre left on Italian monastic, humanist, philosophical, political and book culture in the three centuries after her death – the pivotal years of 1400–1700 – has not, however, been explored holistically or systematically. This includes but is not limited to the circulation of her Celestial Revelations in Latin and vernacular, manuscripts and prints; apocryphal texts attributed to her; her reemergence as a figure of prophetic authority during the Italian Wars; her influence on Renaissance and Counter-Reformation theology; and how women writers engaged Birgitta’s voice and writings to shape their own authorial identities. While she is “Birgitta of Sweden,” a third of her life was spent in Italy. She most likely spoke Italian; many of her interlocutors and friends were figures who are famous today for their impact on Italian culture, literature, and art. We might consider her alongside other Northern European intellectuals of the premodern age whose work was enriched by the Italian context, and as a precursor to another Swedish woman to take Rome by storm, Christina of Sweden.
The Legacy of Birgitta of Sweden in Ten Chapters
The present volume offers an opening into the rich world of Birgitta’s legacy in Renaissance Italy, with ten interdisciplinary chapters written by an international group of scholars of Italian Renaissance literature, book history, and material culture. The investigations herein are the result of a multi-year research project generously funded by a grant from the Research Council of Norway (2018–2022), and which involved the ongoing collaboration of researchers, postdoctoral fellows, and PhD students working in Italy, Sweden, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States. This volume is by no means the project’s final product: contributions to “The Legacy of Birgitta of Sweden” that have been completed or are underway include one dissertation, two scholarly monographs, one trade publication, multiple articles and conference presentations, and a database.65 This last digital component also signals perhaps our most ambitious aim: the continued study of Birgitta of Sweden’s legacy in Italy, as well as the study of early modern women’s voices in politics more broadly.66 Through the online mapping and cataloguing of the Italian and Latin manuscripts and early print editions of Birgitta’s literary work, the project has achieved a systematic overview of the extant materials that were produced and circulated in late medieval and early modern Italy. The results, which include a substantial bibliography, maps, brief biographies of relevant actors, and links to manuscripts and to early printed editions, serve to provide an important point of departure for researchers of early modern religious, gender, political and book history. We believe that Italy is but a first step in the examination of her influence across early modern Europe, for Birgitta’s work had a strong impact in other countries as well.
As this volume makes clear, Birgitta’s voice – prophetic and eloquent – was present, and remarkably influential, during the construction of Italian Renaissance literary, spiritual, and political culture as we understand it today. The transmission and impact of her words in the centuries after her death can be traced from the first transcriptions, translations and circulations of her texts of the 1380s and 1390s to the reform movement and the women writers who published in the 16th century. In the 1540s Olaus Magnus (1490–1557), the Swedish bishop, cartographer and humanist who chose the Catholic side during the Reformation, moved to Rome. He took charge of the Casa di Santa Brigida in Piazza Farnese, where Birgitta had lived and died, and which had become a house for Swedish Catholic pilgrims in the 15th century before falling into disrepair in the first decades of the Reformation.67 There, he established a small printing press, where he published the work for which he is best known, the History of the Northern Peoples (1555). Magnus was also invested in amplifying the importance of his countrywoman Birgitta in the Italian Catholic milieu in which he was exiled. In 1553, Magnus produced an abridged version of her vita (1553), which was translated in 1558 into the vernacular for the noblewoman Margherita Acciaioli by the important publisher and polygraph Lodovico Domenichi, who was then finalizing his important anthology of women’s writing published in 1559 by the Lucca publisher Busdraghi.68 Magnus also published a landmark edition of Birgitta’s Revelaciones in 1557, which would be the last complete edition published in Italy for half a century.
Magnus’ efforts helped to solidify Birgitta’s legacy among Catholics in the troubled years during the Council of Trent (1545–1563). While there was a significant gap after Magnus’ edition in which her work was not published, Birgitta’s popularity continued well into the 17th century: of note, new important editions of her Revelaciones by Consalvo Durante were published in 1606 and 1628, as well as many other books about her, including Girolamo Alle’s biography La vedova svedese (1648).69 The essays in this volume investigate the long centuries from the first circulation of Birgitta’s vita and revelations after her death to the end of the Counter-Reformation.
The first chapter, “Birgitta and Pseudo-Birgitta: Textual Circulation and Perceptions of the Saint,” explores the popular image of Birgitta in Renaissance Italy. Brian Richardson asks: what did Italians know of Saint Birgitta and her writings during the Renaissance? While she was renowned for her saintly widowhood in the decades after her death and canonization, the circulation of her revelations was still relatively limited. They were available in manuscript, in Latin and in vernacular translations, among members of her order in Florence and Genoa, and among some devout laypeople, at least in the urban centres of Naples, Siena and Florence. For perhaps the majority of Renaissance Italians, however, Birgitta’s name was best associated not with her revelations, but instead with two groups of texts composed mainly in the 15th century and falsely attributed to her. The first are the Quindici orazioni or Fifteen Prayers on Christ’s passion, which proliferated across Italy and are still popular today (you can even pick up a free copy at the Casa di Santa Brigida in Rome). The others were numerous vague verse prophecies interpreted as relating to the conflicts between France and the Holy Roman Empire and between Christians and Ottomans. Richardson establishes the important manuscript and print history of these extremely popular texts, showing that the circulation of vernacular prophecies was partly associated with non-élite readers, and that there is evidence of their oral transmission. He concludes that it was difficult for many secular readers in Italy to separate the “real” Birgitta from these apocryphal texts.
In the second chapter, “Making Birgitta Italian: The Time of Translation,” Jane Tylus explores the impact of Birgitta in 14th- and 15th-century Tuscany. In the spring of 1374, Catherine Benincasa wrote that Pope Gregory XI had sent to Siena “il padre spirituale di quella Contessa che morì a Roma” – the confessor to the countess who died in Rome – “to say that I should offer special prayers for him and for the holy Church.” The countess is Birgitta, the confessor Alfonso Pecha. Thus, our first indication that Catherine was being groomed to continue Birgitta’s legacy and carry out her dream of returning the papacy to Rome. Over the next century, Birgitta would be definitively transferred to Tuscany, and the Dominicans – such as Catherine – would be particularly welcoming of her message and her unfinished projects. The chapter focuses on roughly a century of this alliance with Birgitta in Florence, Siena, and elsewhere, as evident in paintings, manuscripts, and treatises produced within Dominican contexts through the late Trecento and Quattrocento.
What is the connection between prophecy, women, and theology? Isabella Gagliardi raises this question in the book’s third chapter, “Prophetic Theology: the Santa Brigida da Paradiso in Florence,” and suggests that spiritual and devotional literacy in the Florentine convent of Santa Brigida al Paradiso may offer an answer. Between the 14th and 15th centuries, the Birgittine Paradiso was a remarkable microcosmos boasting an important scriptorium which produced beautiful editions of both Birgitta’s true and apocryphal works. The convent’s library also possessed the oldest copy of the Mistica Theologia, responsible for the idea of devotio moderna in Italy, as well as one of the most significant books to legitimate the personal relationship between God and humans. The chapter demonstrates the “prophetic” construction of the monastic library; moreover, Gagliardi identifies the interpretative problems caused by the nuns’ gender, and the strategies they used to solve them.
In 1533, the nun Domenica Narducci delivered a sermon in the convent of La Crocetta in Florence to the Duchess of Camerino, Caterina Cibo. In the fourth chapter, “A Lineage of Apocalyptic Queens: The Portrayal of Birgitta of Sweden in Domenica Narducci’s Sermon to Caterina Cibo (1533),” Clara Stella provides a close reading of the sermon, in which Narducci presents Birgitta to the Duchess as a spiritual, civic, and intellectual role model. Narducci envisioned the Swedish saint as the last in a parade of allegorical queens, with special recourse to the apocalyptic traits of Mary, and imagery that blended John’s Apocalypse with Birgitta’s Revelations. As she applies Marian apocalyptic elements to historical figures, Narducci positions the saint as the supreme tabernacle of military and intellectual virtues: in other words, her ideological leader. As addressee, Cibo is invited to take part in this parade, or lineage, of allegorical and historical queens and link her personal identity to the universality of history. The chapter also touches upon private forms of dissemination of Birgitta’s cult among secular noblewomen and aristocratic families in the years when Birgitta was a focus for Church censors.
In the fifth chapter, “The Fifteen Prayers Attributed to Birgitta and Their Circulation in Early Modern Italy: Private Devotion, Heterodoxy, and Censorship”, Marco Faini explores the circulation in print of the Quindici orationi or Fifteen Prayers attributed to Birgitta of Sweden, as well as their changing relationship to early modern Italian spirituality. Extremely popular, the Fifteen Prayers were printed several times from the late 15th century onwards in the form of tiny booklets, often adorned with a woodcut and accompanied by rubrics stating the power of each prayer, as well as by other prayers. Later in the 16th century, they began to circulate in collections of prayers, such as the successful Selva di orationi by Niccolò Bonfigli, which had at least twelve editions from 1569 to 1616. In the mid-16th century, however, the Fifteen Prayers came to represent, almost par excellence, a “superstitious” form of devotion for the so-called Spirituali. The prayers thus became the target of criticism by figures such as Celio Secondo Curione, Vittore Soranzo, and even Pietro Aretino – despite the fact that they make explicit allusions to the predestination of the elect and to salvation through Christ’s passion. Later in the century, the Church also targeted the Fifteen Prayers. Although they never featured on the official Index of prohibited books, from the 1570s, they did appear on local, semi-official lists of prohibited prayers, often with specific instructions as to the censorial interventions they should undergo. The Church was seemingly more concerned with their “superstitious” content than with their potential allusions to Reformer ideas. Exploring a number of publications, Faini investigates if, how, and to what extent printers applied the instructions handed down by censors, while also analysing the Prayers themselves, situating them within Italian private devotional culture from the late 15th to the mid-17th century.
Birgitta’s prophetic voice, legitimated by her canonization in 1391, was in high demand by the 16th century, as evidenced by the direct juxtaposition of her image in the Ponzetti Chapel (Baldessare Peruzzi, 1516) with Raphael’s frescoes of the Four Sibyls heralding the arrival of Christ on the walls of Santa Maria della Pace (1514). Indeed, in a woodcut in Lichtenberger’s 1488 Pronosticatio and its Italian translations over the following decades, Birgitta is positioned directly next to the Sibyl, a classical symbol of female prophecy, as a Christian prophetic counterpart within the context of political and military upheaval. As Brian Richardson’s contribution to this volume shows, manuscript and, later, printed prophecies attributed to her flourished during the 15th and 16th centuries. The sixth chapter, “Ventriloquizing Birgitta: The Saint’s Prophetic Voice During the Italian Wars,” co-authored by Jessica Goethals and Anna Wainwright, examines how those prophecies were revisited and transformed during the Italian Wars. Similar to historical laments, which were often delivered by personified female cities, Birgitta’s ventriloquized voice was appropriated as a means of making sense of the terrible destruction visited on Italian cities, as Italy itself was described alternately as Italia putta (Italy the whore) and Italia vedovella (Italy the little widow). The chapter explores these prophecies within the context of Birgitta’s broader prophetic profile and the gendered representation of devastated cities against the backdrop of military violence in Renaissance Italy.
The controversial prophet Paola Antonia Negri (1508–1555) lived in a period of intense trouble for Northern Italian cities and the Catholic Church, and authored more than one hundred spiritual letters. She was the leader of the Angelics, the female branch of the Barnabites, but exerted an absolute authority over the whole order. Following the start of the Council of Trent in 1545, her ideas and behavior started to provoke hostile reactions from Church institutions and local authorities, until she was banned from the Barnabites. In 1576, 21 years after her death, 70 of her spiritual letters were published together with her vita penned by Giovan Battista Fontana De Conti, who explicitly links Negri’s experience with those of Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena. Amid the Counter-Reformation, Birgitta’s name re-emerged to legitimate the charisma of a much-debated godly woman who might have been confined to the silence of history. In the seventh chapter, “The Semantics of Obedience: Birgittine Influences on Paola Antonia Negri’s Letters,” Eleonora Cappuccilli sheds light on some of the ways in which the Birgttine prophetic model continued to be a relevant issue in Counter-Reformation Italy.
Chiara Matraini’s Breve Discorso sopra la vita e laude della beata vergine Maria (1590) is one of four religious works published in the last years of the writer from Lucca, best known for her Rime (1554). Matraini’s Breve Discorso can be inscribed within the genre of the “life of the Virgin”, hugely popular in Italy during the post-Tridentine period. However, the text includes some unusual characteristics which may be better understood in light of the possible influence of Birgitta’s Sermo Angelicus de excellentia beatae Virginis. While Matraini’s use of Jacopo da Voragine’s Legenda aurea has long been noted, and, more recently and convincingly, her use of the Italian translation of Ludolph of Saxony’s Vita Christi, the influence of Birgitta of Sweden’s Marian writings has not been explored. In the eighth chapter, “Discourses on the Virgin Mary: Birgitta of Sweden and Chiara Matraini,” Eleonora Carinci proposes a comparison between the Breve Discorso and the Sermo Angelicus, underlining the elements that suggest Matraini’s Birgittine inspiration. Matraini’s attention to specific themes and words, as well as her relationship to the Virgin, recall Birgittine devotion, and suggest that Matraini’s work is an important example of Birgitta’s legacy in the post-Tridentine period. Carinci also considers the channels which may have inspired Matraini’s direct or indirect interest in Birgitta.
The critical reputation of the Benedictine religious poet Angelo Grillo (1557–1629) has grown impressively in recent decades, and he is now rightly seen as a key transitional figure between the Renaissance and Baroque poetic traditions in Italy. In the ninth chapter, “‘Consenti, o pia, ch’in lagrimosi carmi …:’ Saint Birgitta in the Verse, Thought, and Artistic Commissions of Angelo Grillo,” Virginia Cox considers a little-explored aspect of Grillo’s religious poetics: the influence of Birgitta, whose Revelations Grillo identifies in his Cristo flagellato (1607) as the poetic matrix of his work. Cox locates Grillo’s allusions to Birgitta within the publication history of the Revelations at this time, with special reference to the 1606 Rome edition by Durante.
In the tenth chapter, “‘The Most Illustrious and Divine of All the Sibyls’: Saint Birgitta in the Prophetic Visions of Tommaso Campanella and Queen Cristina of Sweden,” Unn Falkeid explores Birgitta’s role in two texts composed in the wake of the Thirty Years’ War and the prophetic revival in Rome. During his long, torturous years in a Neapolitan prison, Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) wrote the treatise Monarchia del Messia (1605). While far less studied than his famous dialogue La Città del Sole, written in the same period, Monarchia del Messia is of crucial importance and reveals some of the most central, though troubling, strands of Campanella’s writings. In his visions of uniting all of humanity in “a single fold under one shepherd,” Campanella frequently quotes Birgitta, at a moment when the Celestial Revelations were the focus of renewed interest, as this introduction has discussed. The other source explored in this chapter is an oratorio written in 1673 by Cardinal Decio Azzolino, three hundred years after Birgitta’s death, and dedicated to Queen Christina of Sweden (1626–1689). In the oratorio, a fictive Birgitta hails the queen as the expected liberator of the world. What Campanella’s text uncovers, together with the intense commitment to prophetic ideas among Christina’s circle of friends and acquaintances, is a most curious embracing of Birgitta’s revelations at the threshold of modernity.
Following the essay chapters, we include in appendix an important new study of Birgitta’s vitae by Silvia Nocentini, “One Life, Many Hagiographers: The Earliest Vitae of Birgitta of Sweden.” The earliest Latin hagiography of Birgitta of Sweden is characterized by a stratification of (at least) three Latin versions of the confessors’ Vita, all datable to before her canonization process (1391) and very close to each other: the so-called Vita C15, which is the shortest one; the Vita later included in the acts of the canonization process; and the Vita retractata or Vita Panisperna, enriched with several additional miracles. Given Alfonso of Jaén’s key role in spreading Birgitta’s writings, one might think the hagiographic tradition would centralized and stable. The philological evidence, however, suggests something very different: every step towards her canonization was marked by a different arrangement of the Life, with different readers given different texts. This multiplicity is a challenging issue for philologists as well as for historians, and Nocentini argues that new editions are necessary. Without reliable critical texts, we can only speculate about which of the three versions was the earliest, who its readers were, and how wide its diffusion was in Europe.
Conclusions
At the close of this introduction, the co-editors would like to reflect on the findings of the scholars who have contributed to this volume, ourselves included. One of the most exciting aspects of this project has been that, to a great extent, our results were not entirely what we expected. Rather than a direct, easily identifiable link between Birgitta and one or more prominent Renaissance women, we instead found her embedded in Italian culture in a variety of strange, even mystical ways. That she became an exemplum in Italy is indisputable, and not only to holy women like Catherine of Siena and Francesca Romana, but to noblewomen like Caterina Cibo and Vittoria Colonna.70 What is perhaps more surprising is that during the tumult of the Italian Wars and Reformation, and even well into the Counter-Reformation and the Baroque, Birgitta continued to represent an important touchstone with a unique authority that could be activated by both men and women. Throughout the tempestuous three centuries following her death, Birgitta’s voice remained audible and clear.71
See especially Virginia Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (Baltimore: 2008); Brian Richardson, Women and the Circulation of Texts in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: 2020); and Diana Robin, Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Chicago: 2007).
The vision in which Saint Birgitta appears is visio XLI, rendered in Tractatus de visionibus, which is the Latin translation of Francesca Romana’s revelations, collected and edited by her confessor Giovanni Mattiotti. See Santa Francesca Romana. Edizione critica dei trattati latini di Giovanni Mattiotti, ed. Alessandra Bartolomei Romagnoli (Vatican City: 1994).
Further information about the life of Saint Francesca Romana can be found on the website of her monastery Tor de’ Specchi in Rome: Tor de’ Specchi – Monastero delle Oblate di S. Francesca Romana – Santa Francesca Romana (tordespecchi.it). See also Emerenziana Vaccaro and Maria Letizia Casanova, “Francesca Romana,” in Biblioteca Sanctorum, vol. 5, Roma, 1965, coll. 1011–1028; Angelo Montonati, Francesca Romana (Milan: 2008) and Francesca Canepuccia, How to Become a Prophetess: Strategies for Authorizing a Prophetic Mission in the Works of Francesca Romana (PhD dissertation, University of Oslo: 2023).
For more information about the Great Western Schism, see A Companion to the Great Western Schism: 1378–1417, ed. Joëlle Rollo-Koster and Thomas M. Izbicki (Leiden: 2009).
Not long after his election, Pope Eugene IV attempted unsuccessfully to dissolve the council, which only strengthened the sake of the conciliarists who claimed that the supreme authoroity resided with the council, and not with the pope.
Francesca Romana, Tractatus, visio XLI, 3: “Bene veniat dilecta mea filia, que est missa in statu meo.”
Tractatus, visio XLI, 4: “Ergo, anima, confortare, ne dubites de dono tuo, si ego fui in bona vita.”
In her book The Avignon Papacy Contested. An Intellectual History from Dante to Catherine of Siena (Cambridge, MA: 2017), Unn Falkeid explores Birgitta’s role in the political debates during the 14th century.
Tractatus, visio XLI, 7–8: “Ego totam me disposui in altissimo Creatore, nec fuit ulla res alia que me admoveret a suo amore. Omnia vici animose, ius et ratio me iuvabant, quia lux vera me illuminabat et meum intellectum declarabat, et humilitas profunda in mea mente erat fundata, et nulla poterat esse res que michi non esset renovata, tantum stabam semper provisa et semper eram forensis et advena. Nichil transitorium possidebam, sed semper libera incedebam, semper in obedientia firma, nec ab ea umquam discessi.”
Jane Tylus describes her as “the paragon, the over-achiever of late medieval pilgrims.” For a rich study of the meaning of pilgrimage in Birgitta’s literary oeuvre, see Tylus, “‘Su dunque, peregrino!’: Pilgrimage and Female Spirituality in the Writings of Birgitta and Catherine,” in Sanctity and Female Authorship. Birgitta of Sweden & Catherine of Siena, ed. Maria H. Oen and Unn Falkeid (London and New York: 2020), 35–53.
In a famous legend connected to Francesca, a guardian angel illuminated the road before her with a lantern so she could walk safely, the reason Roman taxi drivers still venerate her as their patron today.
Tractatus, visio XLI, 10: “Non sine causa nos habemus, tu vides, hanc gloriam, quam possidemus, et plus est quam id quod vides. Si minimum illius gaudii, quod hic est, tu sentires, per medium te rumperes et pati numquam posses.”
On the schismatics in Inferno, see Justin Steinberg, “Dante’s Justice? A Reappraisal of the Contrapasso.” L’Alighieri n.s. 44 (2014): 59–74.
Roma, Touring Club Italiano, 2004. See also P. Ronci, Basilica di Santa Maria Nova, Santa Francesca Romana al Foro Romano (Christen: 1973).
In a letter from 1378, Birgitta’s youngest daughter, Katarina Ulfsdotter, wrote that the pope reportedly had a picture of Birgitta in his papal chamber in Avignon, and she expressed her surprise that her mother was better known in Italy than in her native land. See Sara Ekwall, Vår äldsta Birgittavita och dens varianter (Stockholm: 1965), 99, 129–130. See also Bridget Morris, introduction to bk. IV, in Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden, 2: 21 n33.
The striking sculpture of Francesca and an angel at the church, which was carved by Giosuè Meli in 1866 and placed at the center of the confessional, is of a later date; it is clearly modelled on the marble relief medallion made by the Bernini school and located close to Francesca’s grave in the crypt.
For Queen Christina’s patronage and friendship with Bernini, see Lillian H. Zirpolo, “Christina of Sweden’s Patronage of Bernini: The Mirror of Truth Revealed by Time”. Woman’s Art Journal, Vol. 26, No 1 (Spring-Summer 2005), 38–43. According to Zirpolo, the Roman citizens not only hailed Christina as the “Minerva of the North,” they also called her “The Patroness of Rome” as her extensive patronage activities enhanced Rome’s reputation as a center of culture.
André Vauchez, Laity in the Middle Ages: The Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices (Notre Dame, IN: 1993 [1987]), 220–24.
See Virginia Cox’s chapter in this volume. For a study of this miracle and its impact on the Roman popular devotion, see Claudia D’Alberto, Claudia, “Il crocifisso parlante di Santa Brigida di Svezia nella basilica di San Paolo fuori le mura, e i crocefissi replicati, copiati, e riprodotti a Roma al tempo del papato avignonesi,” Studi medievali e moderni. Arte, letteratura, storia, 15, n. 1–2 (2011): 229–55.
On this see especially Peter A. Mazur, Conversion to Catholicism in Early Modern Italy (New York: 2016).
A warm thanks for this detail goes to Francesca Canepuccia, who completed her doctoral studies at the University of Oslo on Francesca Romana. Canepuccia, who was employed by the research project The Legacy of Birgitta of Sweden. Women, Politics and Reform in Renaissance Italy, funded by The Norwegian Research Council (2018–2022), has generously provided us with important information about the Roman saint and her visions. We look forward to her forthcoming dissertation, How to Become a Prophetess: Strategies for Authorizing a Prophetic Mission in the Works of Francesca Romana (University of Oslo: 2023), which will be the first extensive Anglophone study on Francesca Romana.
The main sources on Birgitta’s life besides her Celestial Revelations are the Vita, written by her two Swedish confessors – Peter Olafsson of Alvastra, usually referred to as Prior Peter, and Peter Olafsson of Skänninge, or Magister Peter, as he is called – and the materials gathered in connection with her canonization process, the Acta et processus canonicacionis beate Birgitte. Bridget Morris is the main modern biographer of Birgitta of Sweden. See Bridget Morris, St. Birgitta of Sweden (Woodbridge, UK: 1999).
Birgitta’s last confessor, Alfonso Pecha da Vadaterra, bishop of Jaén, describes her as a “principessa de regno Suecie,” both in his Informaciones § 3 and his Prologus Libri Celestis § 2. See Arne Jönsson, St. Bridget’s Revelations to the Popes. An Edition to the So-Called Tractatus de summis pontificibus (Lund: 1997), 63.
A good study on the lay piety is Andre Vauchez’s book, Laity in the Middle Ages. See also Barbara Newman, “What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’? The Clash between Theory and Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture,” Speculum, 80.1 (2005), 1–43.
Janken Myrdal, “The Revelations of Saint Birgitta and Everyday Life in the Fourteenth Century,” in Saint Birgitta, Syon and Vadstena: Papers from a Symposium in Stockholm, 4–6 October 2007, ed. Claes Gejrot, Sara Risberg, and Mia Åkestam (Stockholm: 2010), 231–45.
Birgitta’s daughter Katarina testified about the many hospitals Birgitta established in Sweden. See Acta et Processus, 315. See also Birgit Klockars, Birgittas svenska värld (Stockholm: 1976), 96.
Revelaciones extravagantes 80 is usually dubbed Birgitta’s vision of rebellion. Bridget Morris offers an analysis of the vision and its political context in St. Birgitta of Sweden (1999), 31. Se also Olle Ferm, “Heliga Birgittas program för uppror mot Magnus Eriksson”, in Heliga Birgitta – budskap och förebilden, ed. Alf Härdelin and Mereth Lindgren (Stockholm: 1993), 125–143.
In the volume Birgitta och böckerna. En undersökning av den heliga Birgittas källor (Stockholm: 1966), Birgit Klockars offers a thorough study of Birgitta’s library. A more recent study is Päivi Salmensvuori, Power and Sainthood: The Case of Birgitta of Sweden (New York: 2014).
The expression is taken from Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski. Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Western Schism, 1378–1417 (University Park: 2004), 7.
On the “profession” of widowhood, see Katherine Clark Walter, The Profession of Widowhood: Widows, Pastoral Care and Medieval Models of Holiness (Washington, D.C.: 2018); Allison M. Levy, ed., Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: 2003); Louise Mirrer, ed., Upon My Husband’s Death: Widows in the Literature and Histories of Medieval Europe (Ann Arbor: 1992).
See Katherine Clark, “Purgatory, Punishment, and the Discourse of Holy Widowhood in the High and Later Middle Ages.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 16, no. 2 (2007): 169–203.
Acta et Processus, 479: “Quando sepeliui virum meum, sepeliui cum eo omnem a, orem carnalem. Et licet dilexerim eum sicud cor meum, nollem tamen cum vno denario contra velle Dei redimere vitam eius […]”. See also Morris, St. Birgitta of Sweden, 62. On Birgitta as influential exemplum of a holy widow who abandoned her duties to her husband and took on a new role as active political widow, see Chapter Three, “Vere vidua: Holy Women and Models of Widowhood” in Wainwright, Widow City: Gender, Politics and Community in Renaissance Italy (forthcoming, University of Delaware Press).
Collijn, Acta et processus, 80–81: “Post aliquos dies cum sponsa Christi solicita esset de mutacione status sui ad seruiendum Deo et super hoc stabat orando in capella sua, tunc rapta fuit in spiritu, et cum esset in extasi vidit nubem lucidam et de nube audiuit vocem dicentem sibi: ‘Mulier, audi me. […] ‘Noli’ inquit, ‘timere, quia ego sum omnium conditor, non deceptor, non enim loquor tecum propter te solam, sed propter salutem aliorum. […] tu eris sponsa mea et canale meum et audies et videbis spiritualia, et spiritus meus permanebit tecum vsque ad mortem.” Translation by Morris, St. Birgitta of Sweden, 64–65.
On Birgitta as a prophet, see for instance Anders Piltz, “Inspiration, vision, profetia: Birgitta och teorierna om uppenbarelsen,” in Heliga Birgitta – Budskapet og förebilden: Föredrag vid jubileumssymposiet i 3–7 oktober 1991, ed. Alf Härderlin and Mereth Lindgren (Stockholm: 1993), 67–88; Morris, St. Birgitta of Sweden, 64–67; Sahlin, Birgitta of Sweden and the Voice of Prophecy; Alessandra Bartolomei Romagnoli, “Mistica, profezia femminile, e poteri alla fine del Medioevo,” in Il Liber di Angela Foligno e la mistica dei secoli XIII–XIV in rapporto alle nuove culture. Atti del XLV convegno storico internazionale, Todi, 12–15 ottobre, 2008 (Spoleto: 2009), 485–515.
For a thorough study of the medieval beguines, see Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries (Philadelphia: 2003); Rosalynn Voaden, God’s Words, Women’s Voices. The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries (York: 1999); Ernest W. McDonnel, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: 1954).
On the commission, see Sancta Birgitta Revelaciones Book I, with Magister Mathias’ Prologue, ed. Carl-Gustav Undhagen (Uppsala: 1978), 47–50. See also Morris, St. Birgitta of Sweden, 79.
For a thorough examination of the centuries of arguments grounded in Pauline injunctions against women’s public speech, see Women Preachers and Prophets Through Two Millennia of Christianity, ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker (Berkeley, CA: 1998). For the debates in the Middle Ages and the theological roots of the resistance against women preaching, see especially Katherine Ludwig Jansen’s chapter “Maria Magdalena: Apostolorum Apostola,” 57–99.
In a vision Birgitta received while still in Sweden, Christ told her: “Go to Rome, where the streets are paved with gold and reddened with the blood of saints and where there is a short cut, that is, a shorter way to heaven […] Moreover, you are to stay in Rome until you see the supreme pontiff and the emperor there at the same time in Rome, and you shall announce my words to them.” Acta et Processus, 94: “Vade Romam, vbi platee sunt auro et sanguine sanctorum rubricate, vbi compendium, id est brevior via, est ad celum […] Stabis autem ibi in Roma, donec summum pontificem et imperatorem videbis ibidem insimul in Roma et eis verba mea nunciabis.” Translated to English by Bridget Morris, St. Birgitta of Sweden, 93.
Birgitta of Sweden, Opera minora I: Regula Salvatoris, ed. Sten Eklunnd (Stockholm: 1975). For an introduction to the rule and its textual history, see Bridget Morris’ introduction in Birgitta of Sweden, The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden, 4 vols. (Oxford: 2006–2015), vol. 4, 109–122.
For a rich study on the Birgittine convents in Europe, see Birgitta Atlas. Saint Birgitta’s Monasteries. A Transeuropean Project, ed. Ulla Sander-Olsen, Tore Nyberg, and Per Sloth Carlsen (Uden: 2013).
Petrarch, Fam. VI, 2, 14: “Quis enim dubitare potest quin illico surrectura sit, si ceperit se Roma cognoscere?” English translation: Francesco Petrarca, Rerum familiarum libri, I–VIII, ed. and trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (Albany, NY: 1875). For further readings of Petrarch’s letter, see Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham: 1993), 14–33; David Galbraith, “Petrarch and the Broken City,” in Antiquity and its Interpreters, ed. Alina Payne, Ann L. Kuttner, and Rebekah Smick (Cambridge: 2000), 17–26; Unn Falkeid, “Petrarch and the Vision of Rome,” Acta Ad Archeologiam et Artium Historiam Pertinentia 25.11 (2012), 195–207.
Rev. III: 27, 23–28: “O, si cognosceres dies tuos, o Roma, fleres utique et non gauderes. Roma quippe in diebus antiquis erat quasi tela colorata omni colore pulcherrimo et contexta nobilissimo filo. Terra quoque eius erat colorata colore rubeo, id est sanguine martirum et contexta, id est commixta ossibus sanctorum. Nunc autem porte eius desolate sunt, quia defensores et custodes earum inclinati sunt ad cupiditatem. Muri eius depressi sunt et sine custodia, quia iam non curant animarum dampna, sed clerus et populus, qui sunt murus Dei, disperguntur ad faciendum utilitatem carnis.” English transl., vol. 1, 313.
See Cristelle Louise Baskins, “Trecento Rome: The Poetics and Politics of Widowhood,” in Widowhood and Visual Culture, ed. Levy, 197–209. See also Ronald Musto, Apocalypse in Rome: Cola di Rienzo and the Politics of the New Age (Berkeley, LA: 2003).
On this see especially Falkeid, The Avignon Papacy Contested, 95–120, and Wainwright’s forthcoming monograph.
Collijn, Acta et processus, 94. See also Morris’ chapter about Birgitta’s years in Rome in St. Birgitta of Sweden, 93–117, and Birger Bergh’s chapter on the same subject in Heliga Birgitta: åttebarnsmor och profet (Lund: 2002), 93–115.
Collijn, Acta et processus, 262, 316, 367, 478, and 498.
The image belongs to a group of three paintings by Niccolò di Tommaso, now in, respectively, the Pinacoteca Vaticana, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Yale University Art Gallery. For discussions of the painting, see Jan Svanberg, “De allra äldsta bilderna av den heliga Birgitta och hennes viosion av Jesu födelse,” Kungl. Vitterhets, historie och antikvitets akademiens årbok (Stockholm: 1997); Erling Skaug, “St. Bridget’s Vision of the Nativity and Niccolò di Tommaso’s Late period,” Arte Cristiana 89. 804 (2001), 195–209. On the impact of Birgitta’s Nativity vision on art, see Maria H. Oen, “Iconography and Visions: St. Birgitta’s Revelation of the Nativity of Christ,” in The Locus of Meaning in Medieval Art: Iconography, Iconology, and Interpreting the Visual Imagery of the Middle Ages, ed. Lena Liepe (Berlin: 2009). For more general studies on the impact of Birgitta’s revelations on art, see Nirit Ben-Aryeh, “St. Birgitta in Florentine Art,” in The Brigittine Experience: Papers from the Birgitta Conference in Stockholm 2011, ed. Claes Gejrot, Mia Åkestam, and Roger Andersson (Stockholm: 2013), 171–89; Anette Creutzburg, Die heilige Birgitta von Schweden. Bildliche Darstellungen und theologische Kontroversebn im Vorfeld ihrer Kanonisation (1327–1391) (Kiel: 2011); Maria H. Oen, “The Iconography of Liber celestis revelacioum,”, in A Companion to Birgitta of Sweden and Her Legacy in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Maria H. Oen (Leiden: 2019), 186–222.
Jane Tylus, Reclaiming Catherine of Siena: Literacy, Literature, and the Signs of Others (Chicago: 2009). See also Tylus’ chapter in this volume.
Collijn, Acta et processus, 84: “[…] verba diuinitus ei data scribebat in lingua sua materna manu sua propria, quando erat sana, et faciebat illa translatari in lingua latina fidelissime a nobis confessoribus suis et postea ascultabat illa cum scriptura sua, quam ipsa scripserat, ne vnum verbum ibi plus adderetur uel deficeret, nisi que ipsa in visione diuinitus audierat et viderat. Si vero erat infirma, vocabat confessorem et scriptorem suum secretarium ad hoc specialiter deputatum, et tunc ipsa cum magna deuocione et timore Dei et aliquando cum lacrimis referebat ei verba illa in uulgari suo cum quadam attenta eleuacione mentali, quasi si legeret in libro, et tunc confessor dicebat illa verba in lingua latina illi scriptori, et ille scribebat illa ibidem in sua presencia, et postea cum erant verba conscripta, ipse volebat illa ascultare et ascultabat valde diligenter et attente.” English translation, Morris, “General Introduction,” in The Revelation of St. Birgitta of Sweden, Vol. 1, 12. Other witnesses also testified to Birgitta’s literacy. See Acta et processus, 270, 328, 384, and 518.
Morris, “General Introduction,” in The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden, Vol. 1, 13. According to Morris, Prior Peter did not follow Birgitta to Rome when she left in 1349, but travelled regularly between Sweden and Rome in the years that followed.
In 1346 the Swedish king, Magnus Eriksson, bequeathed his palace in Vadstena to Birgitta for her planned monastery. His desire was that he and his wife should be buried at the monastery. See Morris, St. Birgitta of Sweden, 86.
Hans Aili, “The manuscripts of Revelaciones S. Birgittae,” in Santa Brigida, Napoli, L’Italia, ed. Olle Ferm, Alessandra Perriccioli Saggese, and Marcello Rotili (Naples: 2009), 153–160.
See especially Anna Fredriksson’s chapter “Challenging and Championing St. Birgitta’s Revelations at the Councils of Constance and Basel,” in A Companion to Birgitta of Sweden, ed. Oen, 103–31.
Roger H. Ellis, “The Swedish Woman, the Widow, the Pilgrim and the Prophetess: Images of St. Bridget in the Canonisation Sermon to Pope Boniface IX,” in Santa Brigida, Profeta Dei Tempi Nuovi (Rome: 1993), 93–150.
Claes Gejrot (ed.). Diarium Vadstenense. The Memorial Book of Vadstena Abbey. Acta universitatis stocholmiensis. Studia Latina Stockholmensiana 33 (Stockholm: 1988), 124–126.
For the Birgittine convents and houses in Italy and Europe, see Birgitta Atlas: Saint Birgitta’s Monasteries, ed. Sander-Olsen, Nyberg, and Carlsen.
For the first translations of Birgitta’s revelations in Italian, see Silvia Nocentini, “The Transmission of Birgittine and Catherinian Works within the Mystical Tradition: Exchanges, Cross-Readings, Connections,” in Sanctity and Female Authorship, ed. Oen and Falkeid, 93–112.
Enrico Narducci (1893), Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum praeter Graecos et Orientales in Bibliotheca Angelica olim coenobii Sancti Augustini de Urbe, Tomus I [mss. 1–1543], complectens codices ab instituta Bibliotheca ad a. 1870. Romae, typis Ludovici Cecchini. 573–574. Further important research by Silvia Nocentini on early editions of her vitae make up the appendix to this volume.
See Birgit Klockars, Birgittas svenska värld; see also Birgitta. Hendes værk og hendes klostre i Norden, ed. Tore Nyberg (Odense: 1991); Saint Birgitta, Syon and Vadstena, ed. Gejrot, Risberg, and Åkestam; Birgitta Atlas: Saint Birgitta’s Monasteries, ed. Sander-Olsen, Nyberg, and Carlsen; Morris, St. Birgitta of Sweden; Sahlin, Birgitta of Sweden and the Voice of Prophecy; Salmesvuori, Power and Sainthood; A Companion of Birgitta of Sweden, ed. Oen.
Isak Collijn, Birgittinska gestaltar. Forskning i italienska arkiv och biblotek (Uppsala: 1929).
Adriana Valerio, “Brigida di Svezia a Napoli: Da una presenza politica ad un culto devozionale,” in Birgittiana 5 (1966), 81–94; “Caterina Cibo e la spiritualità savonaroliana attraverso il magistero profetico di Domenica da Paradiso”, in Munera Parva. Studi in onore di Boris Ulianich, ed. G. Luongo (Naples: 1999), 141–54.
Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Princeton, NJ: 1990).
In his book, The Translation of Religious Texts in the Middle Ages: Tracts and Rules, Hymns and Saints’ Lives (Bern: 2008), Domenico Pezzini offers three chapters on the early translations and circulations of Birgitta’s Revelations (Chapters 2, 6 & 7).
Domenico Pezzini, “Il primo volgarizzamento Italiano delle Ribelazioni e degli altri scritti di S. Brigida: il codice I.V.25/26 della Biblioteca degli Intronati di Siena (1399),” in Santa Brigida, Napoli, L’Italia, ed. Ferm, Saggese, and Rotili, 61–73.
Maria H. Oen and Unn Falkeid, eds., Sanctity and Female Authorship: Birgitta of Sweden & Catherine of Siena, (New York and London: 2020).
Publications in alphabetic order: Francesca Canepuccia, How to Become a Prophetess: Strategies for Authorizing a Prophetic Mission in the Works of Francesca Romana (PhD-dissertation, University of Oslo, 2023); Francesca Canepuccia, “Santa Francesca Romana e papa Eugenio IV: profezia e potere a Roma al tempo del Concilio di Basilea,” Scienza&Politica 34. 66 (2022): 3–44; Eleonora Cappuccilli, “Specchi della riforma. Individualità, profezia e potere in due donne del Rinascimento,” Scienza & Politica. Per una storia delle dottrine 34.66 (2022), 61–82; Eleonora Cappuccilli, “In the steps of Birgitta of Sweden: the reluctant authority of Paola Antonia Negri (1508–1555),” Renaissance Studies 34 (2021), 582–599; Eleonora Cappuccilli, La strega di Dio. Profezia politica, storia e riforma in Caterina da Racconigi (1486–1547) (Rome: 2020); Unn Falkeid, “Stupor et mirabilia! The Ascend of an Early Modern Redeemer,” Scienza & Politica. Per una storia delle dottrine 34. 66 (2022), 15–29; Unn Falkeid, Den hellige Birgitta. Enken som utfordret Europa (Oslo: 2021); Unn Falkeid, “‘Magistra apostolorum.’ The Virgin Mary in Birgitta of Sweden and Vittoria Colonna,” in Vittoria Colonna: Poetry, Religion, Art, Impact, ed. Virginia Cox and Shannon McHugh (Amsterdam: 2021), 75–94; Unn Falkeid, “The Political Discourse of Birgitta of Sweden,” in A Companion to Birgitta of Sweden, ed. Oen, 80–102; Clara Stella, “’I Only Show A Little Of Her.’ The Life of a Forgotten Domenican Sister, Fantina Gambara (1436–1517),” Rivista di storia del cristianesimo 19. 1 (2022), 115–34; Clara Stella, “Umanesimo e profezia: per una lettura delle Epistole Familiares di Laura Cereta (1469–1499),” Scienza & Politica. Per una storia delle dottrine 34. 66 (2022), 45–60; Clara Stella, “Speaking with Authority: Reading Catherine of Siena in the Times of Vittoria Colonna,” Renaissance and Reformation, 44. 4 (2021), 9–50; Anna Wainwright, Widow City: Gender, Politics and Community in the Italian Renaissance (forthcoming with University of Delaware Press).
The Legacy of Birgitta of Sweden: A Database of Networks and Texts in Renaissance Italy, https://birgitta.hf.uio.no/.
See Aron Andersson, La Casa e La Chiesa Di Santa Brigida Nella Storia (Rome: 1989); Carl Bildt, S. Birgittas hospital och den svenska kolonien i Rom under 1600-talet (Stockholm: 1895).
Lodovico Domenichi, Vite de Santa Brigida e Santa Caterina di Svezia. Edizione critica, introduzione e note di Enrico Garavelli (Rome: 2016); on Domenichi’s 1559 anthology of women poets, see Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 105–106.
See database for full bibliography.
On Birgitta’s influence on Francesca Romana, see Santa Francesca Romana. Edizione critica, ed. Bartolomei Romagnoli; Caneppuccia, How to Become a Prophetess; and Wainwright, Widow City. On Cibo see Clara Stella’s contribution to this volume; on Colonna, see Falkeid, “Magistra apostolorum”.
We would like to thank Elissa Weaver, the groundbreaking scholar of early modern Italian women and religion, for her illuminating and important observations on this point in conversation with us.