About the project
European and American scholars have lately uncovered the extraordinary surge of women writers and philosophers in early modern Italy (1350–1700), a number that by far surpasses that of women writers in other countries during the Renaissance.
In the same period, Birgitta of Sweden’s literary oeuvre circulated widely in Italy. Latin manuscripts of Birgitta’s work Revelaciones (Celestial Revelations) were copied in Italian scriptoria, translated into Italian vernacular, incorporated in compilations, and printed in Latin and Italian editions.
However, the legacy of Birgitta’s extensive literary production and its possible impact on female writers and intellectuals in Renaissance Italy has hitherto not been explored. The purpose of this project was to fill this gap.
More about the project
In the last two decades a strong focus within Renaissance studies has been on women’s contributions to the prolific cultural and intellectual production that characterizes early modern Europe. Some figures, such as Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547), and Tullia d’Aragona (1510–1556) have admittedly been assigned a central role in Renaissance literature.
However, the emphasis has traditionally been on the mid-sixteenth century, with many scholars claiming that there was a significant decline of publishing women in Italy during the Counter-Reformation.
This assertion has been powerfully rejected by contemporary scholars. More than 200 women published their writings in the sixteenth century; after a short decrease during the years just following the Council of Trent (1563), there was a considerable reescalation from the 1580s, with Italy boasting popular writers such as the internationally-acclaimed Isabella Andreini.
The fifteenth century also testified a significant production of works written by women, including the humanists such as Isotta Nogarola and Laura Cereta, and spiritual writers such as Lucrezia Tornabuoni and Antonia Pulci. As emphasized by a wide range of scholars, it is now the common scholarly opinion that Italy played a unique role regarding publishing women from the late fourteenth century to 1700.
Birgitta of Sweden
Birgitta of Sweden (1303–1373) lived in Rome the last twenty-three years of her life. The same period represents the peak of her literary production. A central part of her extensive work, Revelaciones (Celestial Revelations) was penned in Italy, either by herself or by her scribes. By the end of the century Birgitta’s entire oeuvre was collected and revised for her canonization petition in 1378.
Contemporaneously, the Latin manuscripts of Birgitta’s Revelaciones circulated widely in Italy. The manuscripts were copied, translated, and gathered in different compilations, and later printed in both Latin and Italian editions. Birgitta’s work comes at the starting point for women writers in early modern Italy. In the following generation, we find two towering female writers, Catherine of Siena and Christine de Pizan, both of whom Birgitta obviously influenced.
But how did Birgitta’s work impact future generations of female humanists and intellectuals? What links might there be between Birgitta and Italian Renaissance women writers, from the early fifteenth century to the age of Queen Christina of Sweden (1626–1689)? These were the principal queries of this project.
Project idea and main hypothesis
The project intended to map networks of political, religious, and intellectual figures connected to the scriptoria, libraries, courts, and convents, as well as presenting comparative readings of female writers and intellectuals related to these networks.
An overall hypothesis was that Birgitta’s legacy played a major role in the flourishing female literature of early modern Italy. While she was also widely studied and cited by male writers, the focus for this specific research project was to explore Birgitta’s legacy among female writers.
There is no doubt that Birgitta may be regarded as a prototype for the following generations of female writers in Italy. Our suggestion was that the dynamics of social relationships between singular figures, families, and cluster groups of friends and acquaintances may supply us with invaluable information about how Birgitta’s texts circulated, how they were interpreted, and how Birgitta herself offered a model for female writers and intellectuals in the Italian Renaissance.
Objectives
The project pursued a three-fold aim:
- By mapping the Italian and Latin manuscripts and early print editions of Birgitta’s literary work, the project aimed to achieve a systematized overview of the extant materials that were produced and circulated in Italy in the Renaissance.
- By creating a database (birgitta.hf.uio.no) (including bibliographies, maps, biographies, and links to manuscripts and to early printed editions), the project prepared the ground for a series of innovative case studies.
- Tracing the networks connected to the production and transmission of manuscripts and print editions (in courts, cities, convents and publishing houses), the project explored the extensive legacy of Birgitta of Sweden in Italy. A central question is how Renaissance and early modern female writers may have fashioned their authorial voice on Birgitta’s Revelaciones.
Subprojects
Mapping Birgitta of Sweden’s Network in Italy
Mapping Birgitta’s network in Italy is crucial in order to understand the future impact of her Revelaciones. The Revelaciones may be regarded as the starting point for the extraordinary surge of women writers in Italy in the Renaissance
With the exception of her frequent trips around Italy, her journey to Cyprus and even to Jerusalem, Rome became Birgitta’s main residence after 1350, and during the last twenty-three years of her life. In Italy, her revelations were gathered into a coherent corpus, and she herself oversaw their translation into Latin.
Mapping Birgitta’s network in Italy is important to understand the future impact of her Revelaciones. The Revelaciones may be regarded as the starting point for the extraordinary surge of women writers in Italy in the Renaissance. Indeed, the collection of her writings represents one of the most extensive literary oeuvres produced by any woman in medieval or early modern Europe, and unquestionably the largest in or prior to her day.
Further to her literary work, her political agency is also unique. No one fought with more fervour and constancy than she did for the return of the papacy to Rome from its long exile in Avignon in Southern France, for the reform of the Church, and for the restoration of Rome as the institutional centre of Christianity.
Moreover, Birgitta is the only woman to have founded a monastic order of her own devising, and the only woman from the fourteenth century, and one of the few laywomen of the later medieval and early modern periods in general, to become formally canonized. These factors – her vast authorship, her clear political voice, and her extraordinary ecclesiastic role – furnished Birgitta with a rare authority which came to form her legacy in the Italian Renaissance.
A tendency within modern scholarship has been to study Birgitta solely within the tradition of holy women in late medieval culture. As such she has been more or less excluded from accounts of European intellectual history, the development of Italian humanism, and the surge of women writers in the Renaissance.
The aim of the first subproject was to restore Birgitta’s role in fourteenth century culture, and her central position both in Italy and in Rome. Her Revelaciones reveals an extraordinary social network of correspondents – knights and friars, popes and cardinals, and Italian noble families such as the Visconti in Milan, the Colonna in Rome, Queen Joanna I of Naples, and Queen Eleanor of Aragon in Cyprus.
This network places her at the centre of the urban and courtly contexts emerging at the threshold of the Italian Renaissance. Likewise, the notions that occupied her, such as the secular power of the Church, the reformation of the clergy, the bloody wars among the Italian city-states, the providential role of the Virgin Mary, and the suffering of Christ, clearly connects her to future generations of reformers in the fifteenth and sixteenth century.
The Early Renaissance
The impact of Birgitta’s legacy and writings on Renaissance and Reformation Italy has yet to be fully explored, and there is still much to be revealed.
In the decades after Birgitta’s death in Rome in 1373 and her canonization in 1391, the leading scriptorium was to be found in Naples, where a strong Birgitta cult emerged. Other important centres in the early fifteenth century were the two Birgittine monasteries: one in Florence, Paradiso in the Pian di Ripoli (1394–1395), as well as the Scala Coeli near Genoa (1406). Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, manuscript copies of Revelaciones were circulating in numerous courts and republics up and down the Italian peninsula.
Fifteenth-century Florence played an important role in the project as a cultural centre and locus for manuscript production, as well as a city in which a prominent woman writer authored numerous spiritual works. Lucrezia Tornabuoni (1427–1482), widow to Piero de’ Cosimo de’ Medici and the mother of Lorenzo il Magnifico, was an important influence on matters civic and religious in Florence, and was highly entrenched in the operations of a number of convents and civic charities. She was also the author of numerous sacred representations, including stories on the biblical heroines Judith and Esther.
Further to the circulation of Latin manuscripts, two Italian vernacular translations of Birgitta’s Revelaciones were produced in 1494 and 1495 at the Paradiso convent. The project intended to explore how these translations were connected to contemporary historical events in Florence: The manuscripts were completed at a moment when Birgitta’s message of reform would have been especially appealing in the Tuscan city, as the Medici were ousted from power, Charles VIII invaded Italy, and the preacher Savonarola, who himself claimed prophetic visions, ruled over the city of Florence from 1494–1498.
Thirty years later, the publication of Birgitta’s corpus coincided with another reform movement: In the early years of the Italian Reformation, Revelaciones would be published as Prophetia di Sancta Brigida by the Florentine printer Francesco di Giovanni Benvenuto in 1529, just before the catastrophic Siege of Florence. How were Birgitta’s prophesies perceived during these dramatic incidents?
The Reform Movement in the 1530s and 1540s
It was not only in Florence that Birgitta’s texts and message of reform enjoyed attention by Italian scribes and printers; further to Latin and vernacular manuscripts, numerous editions or extracts of Revelaciones were published in Rome after 1510 as the publishing boom of the sixteenth century began.
Nearly two hundred years after Birgitta’s death, the Rome of the 1530s and 1540s was a city in which Birgitta herself might have felt very much at home. The debate over Church reform was in full swing, and leading figures included Michelangelo Buonarroti, Bernardino Ochino, and Reginald Pole. Just as Birgitta had made herself a central figure in the fourteenth-century debate over the Avignon Papacy, Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547) was central to the sixteenth-century debate on reform.
While there has been much scholarly work done on Colonna as an influence in Reformation-era Rome, she has yet to be linked to Birgitta, despite their similarities as prominent widows, religious authors, and female reform leaders in the city of Rome, and Colonna’s careful attention to her own image as a spiritual woman.
Of great importance is Birgitta’s close connection to the mighty Colonna family during her years in Rome; we may assume that Vittoria Colonna recalled these bonds in her own self-fashioning as a prominent widow and female writer of spiritual work. Among other noteworthy connections between the two women, in 1558 the prominent publisher Lodovico Domenichi translated Birgitta’s Vita at the request of the Florentine noblewoman Margherita Acciaiuoli de’ Borgherini; the following year, he published his landmark anthology of Italian women poets, which included numerous poems by Colonna.
In the same period, Colonna’s exact contemporary, the Swedish clergyman and writer Olaus Magnus (1490–1557), was also in Rome. After the success of the Protestant Reformation in Sweden, Magnus chose to remain a Catholic. As a result, he was exiled, and settled in Rome permanently in 1537. Pope Paul III named him Archbishop of Uppsala in 1544; he also attended the Council of Trent between 1545 and 1549.
Birgitta’s legacy as a Catholic saint in Rome proved crucially important to Magnus’s identity as a Catholic in Rome: he lived in the Casa di Santa Brigida on Piazza Farnese, and developed a printing press there. In 1557, the year of his death, he published an edition of Birgitta’s Revelaciones at the press in her own house.
The Impact of Birgitta after the Council of Trent
In the final subproject we explored how Birgitta also came to represent a model for Catholic women who wrote in the Counter-Reformation in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.
Subprojects 2 and 3 considered the Renaissance manuscript and publishing history of Birgitta’s works, including the fifteenth-century convent manuscript tradition in both Latin and vernacular, as well as the sixteenth-century published editions. This was explored alongside an analysis of the Catholic networks in which Colonna and Magnus operated in Rome between 1537 and their respective deaths in 1547 and 1557, in order to reveal the impact of Birgitta’s legacy on Italian women, Catholic reformers, and Swedish exiles in the crucial years before the Council of Trent.
Above all, the project conducted textual analyses of different literary works that have hitherto never been juxtaposed and compared. How did the various agents acting in Rome and Florence in this period, including Olaus Magnus, contribute to cementing Birgitta’s legacy as a female reformer? What motives and ideas do women such as Lucrezia Tornabuoni and Vittoria Colonna, characterized by their deep political and religious commitment, share with Birgitta? Moreover, how did Birgitta come to represent a model for their later authorial voices?
In the final subproject we explored how Birgitta also came to represent a model for Catholic women who wrote in the Counter-Reformation in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Renewed interest in Birgitta after the Council of Trent is confirmed by multiple printings of her Revelaciones (in 1606, edited by Consalvo Durante [in Rome]; in Antwerp in 1611; in Cologne and Rome in 1628; in Munich in 1680). During this same period, Girolamo Alle published his popular biography on Birgitta, La vedova svedese (1648).
The myriad ways Birgitta’s texts, fragments and translations of her Revelaciones may have appeared in anthologies and book collections are still to be explored. Likewise, a number of further influential women, including writers and patrons, are worthy of further investigation, both in terms of possible connections to these publications, and to the lasting influence of Birgitta’s legacy. These include the noblewoman Anna Colonna (1601–1658), Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi (1566–1607), and the Umbrian poet Francesca Turina (1553–1641), whose self-presentation as a pious widow, her dedication of a poem cycle on the rosary to Pope Clement VIII in 1595, and her later tenure as a lady-in-waiting to Lucrezia Tomacelli, the wife of Filippo Colonna, in Rome from 1614–1622, all suggest she would be a rich case worthy of study.
Database
The Database (birgitta.hf.uio.no) was created as part of the project.
Duration
2018–2022.
Financing
The project was funded by The Research Council of Norway (FRIPRO).