Sancta Birgitta. Revelaciones, Book VIII: Liber celestis imperatoris ad reges (review)

Any visitor to the Nordic countries, especially those interested in history and religion, will be surprised by the depth of attachment found in all these lands, Lutheran as they mostly are, to the very Catholic figure of St. Birgitta (c. 1303-1373). The Swedish visionary, reformer, and religious founder has a place in Nordic culture that testifies to the power of her personality over the centuries. Renewed study of the role of women in the Middle Ages, however, has begun tobroaden interest in one of the most fascinating of medieval seers. Birgitta was, indeed, an international figure who spent the last part of her life (1349-1373) outside Sweden, residing mostly in Rome, but also traveling to the Holy Land by way of Cyprus. Her carefully managed ascent to prophetic fame depended on her channeling messages from God to popes, bishops, emperors, kings, nobles, and contemporaries from almost every group in Christendom. (She even uses the term canalis to describe her prophetic activity.) Birgitta's life and revelations, and the fascinating story of her canonization, offer one of the most intriguing examples of a woman gaining extra-canonical power in the late medieval world.

Birgitta's revelations, originally numbering about 700, were first written down in Old Swedish and then translated into Latin by her clerical confessor-secretaries. The last and most important of these, Alfonso Pecha (1327-1389), a hermit and former bishop of Jaén, was responsible for shaping this mass of material into what were originally seven books constituting the Liber celestis, completed c. 1375-1377. Soon thereafter, a book of Revelaciones extravagantes and an eighth book of messages sent to rulers, the Liber celestis imperatoris ad reges, were added. This last contains fifty-eight revelations, twenty-five of which are represented in some form in books II-VII (therefore referred to as "geminated revelations"); the rest of book VIII contains new material. The fact that versions of the whole Liber celestis are found in about 150 manuscripts and that the work was printed as early as 1492 gives one some idea of Birgitta's popularity in late medieval and early modern Europe.

This edition of the Liber celestis imperatoris ad reges brings to a fitting conclusion the critical edition of the works of Birgitta, whose first volume appeared in 1956 (the twelve volumes include Revelaciones I-VIII, the Revelaciones extravagantes, and three volumes of Opera minora). This volume is especially welcome because it contains a reprint of Arne Jönsson's edition of the treatise that Alfonso the hermit wrote to defend the legitimacy of Birgitta's status as visionary and prophet. The Epistola solitarii ad reges is one of the premier medieval texts on the discernment of spirits (see 2 Cor. 12:10), a topic that was given remarkable attention in the late Middle Ages as churchmen sought to cope with the visionary explosion mostly found among women. On the basis of nine manuscripts and the editio princeps, Hans Aili here presents the first complete text of Book VIII, which was often truncated in previous editions due to the presence of the geminated revelations. What Alfonso hoped to achieve through his reworking of Birgitta's accounts forms, in the words of Aili (p. 44), "a Speculum regale," a mirror of the correct and incorrect forms of rulership.

The two poles of Birgitta's incessant proclamation of God's message are iustitia and misericordia—Christ as the Just Judge who threatens eternal punishment for sinful behavior, and Christ as the Merciful Redeemer who always holds out forgiveness for those who repent and amend their ways. The Blessed Virgin, who also frequently speaks to Birgitta (eleven of the revelations in this book), is associated for the most part with the merciful side...