Thanks are due to Arne Jönsson and the other Scandinavian scholars who present their own work in accurate English, so courteously taking into account the language limitations of their larger audience.
The texts of the revelations of Saint Bridget (1302-1373) come to us with a multiple or serial authorship. They were spoken to her in Swedish by Jesus, the Virgin Mary or mystical celestial persons, then entrusted by her in written or spoken Swedish (possibly varied with Italian and some Latin in her later years) to her confessor-secretaries for translation and recording in Latin. Alfonso Pecha, bishop of Jaen from 1359 until he resigned the see to Urban V in 1368, then joined the princess's spiritual family and became her last and plenipotentiary Latin editor (according to his own account of her wishes): she wanted him to redact her revelations for the faithful in such a way that their orthodoxy was clear and unblemished. In this handy paperback Jönsson gives Alfonso's own selection of Bridget's most known revelations, the ones to, about and against the popes of Avignon from Clement VI to Gregory XI.
Jönsson's critical essay occupies two thirds of his pages, and demonstrates quite clearly the value of a separate publication for these thirteen texts, already edited in the Swedish Royal Academy series, Latinska skrifter VII, Reuelaciones S. Birgittae. Four of the Revelations (I, III, XI, XII) already had a fixed Latin form in the collection called Liber celestis when Alfonso Pecha, urgently advocating Bridget's canonization together with the cause of Urban VI's papacy, selected and adapted those four and published them along with nine previously unknown ones, all bearing on the Limousin phase of the papacy at Avignon, the unworthiness of those four popes and their cardinals, and God's will to have the Roman pontiff in Rome.
Jönsson brings the delicate machinery of classical philology to bear on these vagrant texts, demonstrating the limitations of the method. Collation of manuscripts and calculus of their errors, ending in stemmatization and recreation of the archetype: this meticulous procedure can yield only a coarse history of the text and unreliable choices of readings when there never was a single archetype for the whole Tractatus; when the amanuenses had a knowledge of Latin grammar and vocabulary that was sometimes weaker, sometimes sharper, but always freer than the editor's; and, finally, when the variants are seldom really errors and often quite insignificant.
The editor argues at length to establish that "the authentic title" of the collection is the 50-word sentence which leads his best chosen manuscripts, not the short noun phrase which has been used, and by Jönsson himself, for the sake of convenience. It is typical of his painstaking quest for definite decisions in minor matters. The excessive weight placed on fragile evidence causes some errors, and others are due to the accidents which afflict all editors but should be caught in the proof stage. I will pack all my querula into this paragraph, so that readers can skip it entirely if they wish. Two or more manuscripts should not be placed together at the end of the same twig of a stemma (pp. 31, 34, 38). Distinguishing the Florence from the Helsinki manuscript on p. 30, he says "latter" for "former." Calling the Stockholm manuscript "the Vadstena manuscript" and the BL Harley one "the Syon Abbey manuscript" (p. 30) without recital of particulars is unfair teasing. On p. 21: "In VIII: 2, K F give the reading frigor, whereas y q have frigus. To be sure, frigor does exist, but since it is otherwise unknown in the Reuelaciones, we can undoubtedly regard it is [sic] an error in this case." Here and elsewhere, not satisfied with variants which distinguish one manuscript sub-family from another, Jönsson insists on determining what is a wrong version, and to him this means inauthentic: not the reading of the archetype. Does "lectio difficilior potior" mean nothing to today's youth? The "somewhat peculiar Latin" marginal note quoted on p. 24, "post mortem suam elapsit aliquibus annis" could easily be read with "elapsis." A group of other revelations is "the so-called simony office," but why this strange designation? The Greek letter pi designates one class of Revelations manuscripts, but a Latin p slips in on p. 27. On the same page, "In I R the present dat is obviously correct [against dedit] in view of the following precipit, also in the present tense": this in spite of the perfect-tense usage which distinguishes Tractatus rubrics from those of the Liber celestis (demonstrated on pp. 28-29); in spite of the fact that precipit is an easier slip from precepit (a reading which in fact occurs, in the Vienna ms.) than dedit from dat; and in spite of the fact that in the rubric sentence there are three dependent imperfect subjunctives, clashing with the editor's chosen present indicatives. In IX.9, preatus is a typo for prelatus. On p.59, the apparatus to almost all of XI is missing.
Two matters of interpretation rather than craft justify a new paragraph. In VII.8 (pp. 50-51) Jönsson reads, with the Reuelaciones editor Aili, "dyabolus maiorem nunc habet iusticiam et occasionem temptandi eum." I would emend iusticiam to instanciam: the sentence means that in the court of Avignon the devil and his party are the most insistent advocates and are granted the best access to the ear of Gregory XI. I agree with Jönsson's emendation (p. 36) cardinales in III.17; and it is possible to add a further clarification. In this revelation, the mystical preacher on the Gospel side of the sanctuary describes the sad state of the door of Holy Church: its cardines (door-hinge-sockets) are full of rust and dirt, and the uncini (door-hinge-pins) are not bent over to fit into those sockets, but stick straight out: they would extend at right angles to the vertical edge of the door. Then the voice explains that the hollows of the cardines represent humility, and the proudly misshapen uncini are the cardinals, whom the pope should bend with hammer and tongs, like a blacksmith, to their proper function. The confusion of cardines with uncini-cardinales has caused scribal mistakes in this passage, but it is rather good evidence that the text was not originally Latin. It is a curious feature of this revelation that the visual image is not what is revealed: Bridget does not see the fallen door and the faulty hinges. Instead, her revelation is a prose description and interpretation by the mystical preacher, as if Bridget needed both a striking picture and complete control of its interpretation.
Jönsson believes Alfonso to be as transparent a publicist of Bridget's revelations as possible, given that he had to translate them and that he was, by his own account, free to revise them. More skeptical than the editor, I see partisan fiction in every chapter, especially in the nine revelations which first saw the light of day well after Bridget's death. We have no reason to doubt Bridget's saintliness or her ecstasies. But Alfonso was an opportunist whose standing depended on her visions and who could only be exalted by her canonization, which in turn depended on the success of the Roman sect of the Schism. Only on a theory of self-interest can we understand how in these Revelations the colorless climber Innocent VI is the only pope for whom there are good words (de ere meliori), while the pastoral monk Urban V is represented as the willing agent of Hell. The former, it is useful to note, is the pope who gave Alfonso the bishopric of Jaen, while the latter required him to resign it.