sehepunkte 25 (2025), Nr. 7/8

Unn Falkeid / Anna Wainwright (eds.): The Legacy of Birgitta of Sweden

In the introduction to this highly engaging and timely collection of essays, editors Unn Falkeid and Anna Wainwright describe the genesis of the volume as having been rooted in curiosity: what influence did Birgitta of Sweden, the influential Swedish noblewoman, religious visionary, and later saint, have on the women writers of Renaissance Italy? (1) Birgitta's influence on late medieval spirituality and religiosity has long been a vibrant field of study, especially in the context of the Birgittine religious order, founded as a result of one of her divinely inspired visions. The experience and influence of the Birgittine mother house at Vadstena (founded 1346) and the sole English Birgittine house, Syon Abbey (founded 1415), have up until recently dominated the scholarly conversation. However, as the authors note in their introduction, "While she is 'Birgitta of Sweden', a third of her life was spent in Italy" (25), and their argument that we need to consider Birgitta in this Italian context is convincing.

Complementing other recent edited collections like Maria H. Oen's A Companion to Birgitta of Sweden and her Legacy in the Middle Ages (Brill, 2019), which also begins to explore Birgitta's continental contexts, Falkeid and Wainwright's focus on Birgitta's reception among lay women in Italy is a fresh perspective on Birgitta's continental influence. The thrust of their argument is that "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" (27).

While all chapters focus on some aspect of Birgitta's reception in Italy, the content of the essays ranges thematically from translation ("Making Birgitta Italian") to prophecy ("Prophetic Theology", "Ventriloquizing Birgitta", "The Most Illustrious and Divine") to textual circulation ("Birgitta and Pseudo Birgitta", "The Fifteen Prayers") to Birgitta's influence on specific individuals, mostly women ("A Lineage of Apocalyptic Queens", "The Semantics of Obedience", "Discourses on the Virgin Mary", "Consenti, o pia"). These themes are drawn together in a helpful introduction by the editors, which also provides a detailed account of Birgitta's life with a focus on her time in Italy.

One important point that Falkeid and Wainwright mention in passing is the way in which these essays reveal a hitherto unnoticed facet of Birgitta's influence: in Renaissance Italy, Birgitta represented an authoritative cultural touchstone that could be drawn upon in different circumstances. In other words, Birgitta's words, and in some cases her personhood, could be used by different people to authenticate or support their own textual, political, or religious activity. This is a significant legacy indeed, and an idea that has influenced my own work on Birgitta and textual circulation in England.

By placing Brian Richardson's chapter "Birgitta and Pseudo-Birgitta: Textual Circulation and Perceptions of the Saint" first in the volume, the editors have effectively foregrounded the idea that Birgitta's cultural power was so strong that spurious prophetic texts associated with her were translated and circulated in Italy. Furthermore, Richardson's article convincingly argues that this talismanic use of Birgitta in popular prophecy placed Birgitta within the Italian consciousness at multiple social levels, acting alongside the manuscript transmission of her authentic works. Thus, each succeeding article illustrates a facet of Birgitta's legacy in Italy, highlighting the complex and multifaceted ways that this talismanic power interacted with adaptations of her authority and her textuality.

Overall, the sense of the volume is that the Santa Brigida of Renaissance Italy was one who had been moulded and formed by the exigencies of her interlocutors. One of these interlocutors is Birgitta's possible translator Cristofano Guidini, identified by Jane Tylus in her discussion of translations and publications of Birgitta and of Catherine of Siena, through whom "one can hear Birgitta's words as they were meant to be heard: in the language of her hosts, in the language of Rome's pope, in the language of Siena's Catherine" ("Making Birgitta Italian", 74). Another, introduced by Clara Stella in "A Lineage of Apocalyptic Queens", is the Dominican nun Domenica Narducci da Paradiso, who uses Birgitta in her sermons as a figurehead for ecclesiastical reform and renewal just as other figures like Olaus Magnus and Girolamo Savonarola were using her in both Catholic and Reformist circles. One comes away from these articles with a sense that Birgitta could be used by anyone for any purpose: such was her legacy.

Birgitta's Italian readership, often reading and circulating texts in networked community, is presented in this volume as a heterogeneous group. Some, like their counterparts at Vadstena or Syon, were Birgittine nuns. Isabella Gagliardi, in "Prophetic Theology: The Santa Brigida da Paradiso in Florence", describes the reading habits of the Birgittine sisters in Florence, who acted as the main scribes for their own library, which comprised of at least 105 codices. These manuscripts, often copied in the vernacular, demonstrated a link between the Birgittines and the reforming Florentine Jesuati, and also with Carthusian texts like Hugh of Balma's De Theologia Mystica. Other individuals like Chiara Matraini (Carinci, "Discourses on the Virgin Mary") or the poet Angelo Grillo (Cox, "Consenti, o pia") borrow and adapt Birgitta's writing in their own works, showing how Birgitta-as-author continued her influence well into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Lay communities, who read pseudo-Birgittine texts like the Fifteen Prayers (known in Northern Europe as the Fifteen Oes) or Birgitta's authentic Revelations or the inauthentic prophecies featuring her voice, would see Birgitta used as a shorthand for either religious corruption and superstition or for divinely appointed prophecy. More often than not, the authors argue, Birgitta and Pseudo-Birgitta operated in a complicated middle-ground. Marco Faini's "The Fifteen Prayers Attributed to Birgitta and their Circulation in Early Modern Italy: Private Devotion, Heterodoxy, and Censorship" argues that "it is probably not inaccurate to say that the fifteen prayers live in a sort of grey area between orthodoxy and what might be labelled as heterodoxy, and between 'high' and 'popular' culture" (140).

Meanwhile, "Ventriloquizing Birgitta: The Saint's Prophetic Voice During the Italian Wars" by Jessica Goethals and Anna Wainwright, presents Birgitta's authentic and inauthentic prophecies as the culmination of "two centuries of apocalyptic expectations" (183) that were both theological and historical in origin. Unn Falkeid's contribution on Cristina of Sweden ("The Most Illustrious and Divine") explores this tension between prophecy and spirituality more fully by describing Birgitta's prophetic presence in Tommaso Campanella's Monarchia del Messia, defending the supremacy of the papacy. Prophecy is neither fully lay nor religious; it is neither high nor popular culture. The common thread throughout is Birgitta.

The presentation of the volume is attractive, with full-colour images presented in-text, which do not require the reader to flip backwards and forwards while reading. A further appendix of Birgitta's vitae, "One Life, Many Hagiographers: The Earliest Vitae of Birgitta of Sweden", by Silvia Nocentini, is a useful addition, including reference to the print and manuscript sources of the vitae. The bibliography, which is divided helpfully into manuscript, print, and apocryphal sources, also includes a link to Unn Falkeid's Norwegian Research Council project (which shares a title with this volume) and its associated database, "The Legacy of Birgitta of Sweden: A Database of Networks and Texts in Renaissance Italy" (https://birgitta.hf.uio.no). I highly recommend this database, which maps the Italian manuscripts and printed books by or related to Birgitta, to be used in tandem with the volume.