This essay collection stems from the fourth in a series of symposia supported by the Centre for Medieval Studies at Stockholm University, the Birgitta Foundation (Birgittastiftelsen), and the Swedish National Archives. Intended to mark the 100th anniversary of the Birgittastiftelsen, the symposium was planned for 2020 but was postponed until August 2021. The conference focused on Birgittine networks, with specific attention to people, places, and objects. Laura Saetveit Miles’s excellent keynote address, “Birgittine Borrowings in the Middle English Devotional Compilation Meditaciones domini nostri,” itemizes and analyses borrowings from Birgitta’s Revelationes and the Sermo Angelicus, alongside a host of other sources (including Bernard of Clairvaux, Nicholas of Lyra, Richard Rolle, and Elizabeth of Hungary) to demonstrate how the anonymous compiler devised a standard life of Christ and an especially innovative life of the Virgin Mary. Saetveit Miles argues that the Meditaciones domini nostri presents Mary as the apostola apostolorum, a role in which she moves from contemplative to maistres, one “superior in learning” who has “the right--even the obligation--to preach and prophesy” (26) Extant in two manuscripts, the Meditaciones domini nostri is not dedicated to Syon, yet the presentation of Mary aligns with the sisters’ Birgittine liturgy and would have been particularly apropos for the community.
Ann H. Hutchison, who has long committed her scholarly energies to Birgittine studies, explores “Syon Abbey’s First Professions in 1420: Rites and Participants,” to illustrate the difficulties faced when trying to document Syon’s earliest years. Drawing upon a range of medieval and early modern materials, Hutchison speculates about the nature of the rite used on 21 April 1420 when 27 sisters, five priests, two deacons, and four lay brothers were enclosed at Syon by Archbishop Chichele. Only a few of these members can be identified, including the four Swedish sisters who had traveled from Vadstena to help establish the abbey. In 1428, at the election of Robert Bell, Syon’s second confessor general, a surviving list names the 41 nuns, seven priests, one deacon, and six lay brothers, showing the changes in the community within a few short years. Hutchison speculates about the longevity of figures like Simon Wynter, who may have been professed in 1420.
Eiant Klafter’s engaging essay, “Kempe’s Roman Holiday: Elevating Poverty as a Form of Imitatio Birgittae,” discusses Margery Kempe’s pilgrimage account to Rome to illustrate that, unlike the representation of her time in Jerusalem where she followed a set route established by the Franciscans inCustodia Terrae Sanctae, Kempe avoided the standard circulation to follow the steps of Birgitta in Rome. In focusing particularly on Casa di Santa Brigida, where Birgitta lived, Klaster shows that Kempe “created a unique female-authored and female-focused devotional experience of the city” (66).
David Carrillo-Rangel’s “Performing Heavenly Delights in Medieval Barcelona: Circulation of Birgittine Texts and Affective Communities” offers a corrective investigation about the transmission and reception of the cult of Birgitta in the Peninsular Kingdoms. While there has been previous work on Iberia (including post-medieval discussions of the English College in Valladolid), which has largely been ignored by scholars, this essay urges reconsideration in its survey of the manuscript and print culture of the Liber Celestis and the Celeste Viridarium, as well as the Revelationes, in the environs of Barcelona. The essay concludes with a particularly useful examination of the Hieronymite Beguines of Barcelona, a community that developed around the figure of Sor Sança, one of Birgitta’s companions in Rome. As Carrillo-Rangel rightly asserts, far more work is needed on the Peninsular Kingdoms.
Anna-Stina Hägglund’s “Birgittine Circles in the Baltic Sea Region: Intercessory Prayers and Gifts of Friendship” investigates donations to Mariendal (Estonia), Marienkrone (Germany), and Nådendal (Finland) to illustrate that among the earliest sites of expansion of the Birgittine Order around the Baltic Sea, these communities were supported by elites and burghers, including ones such as Birger Johannesson, a Danish tradesman who was not from Straslund but who owned a house there, which he donated to the community. Two of the most intriguing donations to Nådendal were given by Lady Ingeborg Magnusdotter and her husband Hartvik Japsson, who each offered an estate to pay “for the entry of a woman whom they ‘adopted’ as their own daughter” (107). In essence, this childless couple adopted women who could pray for their souls as Birgittines.
Roger Andersson’s exciting article, “A Newly Discovered Old Swedish Sermon on Indulgences at Vadstena,” provides a transcription and translation of a fragment in Old Swedish that details the community’s indulgence privileges. This fifteenth-century fragment, discovered in 2019 among a group of uncatalogued documents in the Uppsala University Library, is anonymous but likely not written by a member of the community. Andersson provides a brief study of the linguistic and paleographical features of the fragment, as well as a summary of the text, suggesting that while the document “is not cast in the neatly structured way in which the majority of written sermons are organized” it has the characteristics of a sermon composed for laity. This discussion of uncatalogued material is an urgent reminder of the necessity of archival investigations.
Katarina Hallqvist’s “Growing for Paradise: Birgittine Guidance for the Mind’s Eye in some Ad Vincula Sermons” uses a sermon by Acho Iohannis on gemstones alongside two others by Petrus Olavi and Nicolaus Ragvaldi to posit an interpretation of the Motala buckle, a gold circle ornamented with precious and semi-precious stones, which was found in a Swedish river in 1818. Hallqvist argues that the gems, as described in Acho’s sermon, provided a means for a lay person “to contemplate that which cannot be seen and to consider it in an anagogical way” (138). Drawing upon Claire Barbetti’s theory of medieval ekphrasis, Hallqvist considers the Motala buckle a form of religious art that would have allowed the wearer to imagine the piece, which was worn across the chest to fasten a cloak, as a talisman that invoked the Christian values Acho ascribes to the gemstones. Hallqvist’s is an engaging argument that requires more space than the brief opportunity the essay collection offers, for the buckle itself receives very little description or analysis of its various gems.
Karin Lagergren’s investigation of the Cantus sororum, “Birgittine Liturgical Music--Teamwork or the Product of a Single Genius Mind?: A New Hypothesis for an Old Question,” offers a historically informed chronology for the development of the Birgittines’ unique repertory, arguing that while Magister Petrus worked with Birgitta to create an experimental liturgy that was used in Birgitta’s home in Rome, it was really after the 1370s that “this liturgy was revised, expanded, reworked, exchanged” at Vadstena with support from the Linköping Cathedral. Further chants were integrated between 1373 and 1391, the year of Birgitta’s canonization, and this process of development continued through 1430, when Vadstena’s abbey church was dedicated. Lagergren suggests that 1430 is the date by which the Cantus sororum was codified, after which it was transmitted to other foundations. This timeline begs the question of what the various Birgittine houses were using before 1430, perhaps some form of the earliest liturgy devised at Vadstena, but whatever the case, it is highly unlikely that the liturgy sprang fully formed from the hand of Magister Petrus.
Eva Lindqvist Sandgren draws upon pilgrim accounts and other historical documents to offer a 3D model of the abbey church at Vadstena, arguing in “The Organization of the Birgittine Abbey Church in Vadstena: An Innovative Recycling of Established Concepts” that the layout purposefully placed the altar of the Virgin Mary at the east, followed by the altar of Birgitta, and then the sisters’ gallery. The proximity of the women to their founder and to the Virgin, to whom they were devoted, was in counterpoint to the brothers’ choir at the west. Altars for the apostles, where the laity were to worship, lay between the brothers’ choir and the sisters’ gallery. Lindqvist Sandgren suggests that this “was a very conscious strategy” developed by Birgitta herself to emphasize a woman-designed space for women.
Biörn Tjällén’s “Birgittines in Norrland: Agents of Church Reform and Sámi Conversion” uses a reverse chronology to demonstrate connections between the Birgittines and efforts to convert the Sámi. This intriguing study focuses on a Birgittine friar’s mission to Norrland in 1525, an earlier mission in 1419 by a priest connected to Vadstena and active in the parish church, and the request of Margareta, a Sámi visionary who appealed for conversion in her homeland in the 1380s, to suggest that Birgitta herself was “familiar with and interested in the pastoral care in Norrbotten as early as the 1340s” (213).
The interdisciplinary collection of essays, focused as it is on various networks associated with the Birgittines, speaks to the many avenues by which scholars can engage with a religious Order, philosophically, materially, and historically. In focusing on material and documentary survivals--and in providing a number of color photographs of these objects--the various “circles” presented here illustrate exchanges between close and distant connections to analyze their social significance. The group of essays overall is strong, with the very best being those by Saetveit Miles, Lagergren, Lindqvist Sandgren, and Tjällén. Scholars interested in Birgittine studies will find much here to delight, such as how Margareta, “a simple, poor, and uneducated woman” (208), moved a queen to consider the religious needs of her Sámi community, and much to intrigue, including how the geography near Lake Vättern affected the building of Vadstena Abbey. This carefully edited collection is an exceptional contribution to a celebrated symposia series.