BrideCloak

n important image/concept in Florence is of Mary's cloak under which are gathered men and women. We see this in the Bigallo Madonna della Misericordia, painted in 1342, where she is shown with the Tau Cross on her Matelda-of-Tuscany-like crown, and with the Seven Acts of Mercy embroidered on her cloak, while sheltering all Florentines. These Seven Acts of Mercy, 1. Feed the Hungry, 2. Give drink to the Thirsty, 3. Clothe the Naked, 4. Shelter the Stranger, 5. Visit the Sick, 6. Visit the Prisoner, 7. Bury the Dead, are shown graphically in the embroidered roundels.

Simone Martini had painted the Madonna of Mercy, 1308. A very beautiful polychromed sculpted Madonna of Mercy is exhibited in the Bargello Museum. Other versions follow:

Here, in the woodcut of Savonarola preaching, as in so many Madonna of Mercy images, men are on one side, women on the other, while the sense is that all of Florence sheltered under the dome of its cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, as if it were Mary’s cloak or her breast, sheltering and nurturing the city. In this iconography all who are saved, all who are Christian, are as if enwombed in Mary’s Body with Christ.

Tuscany was largely christianized by the Irish saints Frediano, Donatus, Andrea and Brigida, who was Donatus' sister and named after the great Irish saint. Saint Donatus even wrote about the miracle of the earlier Saint Bridget hanging her cloak on a sunbeam to dry following a rainstorm

here are two Saint Brides, even three Saint Brigids.I have a great Irish friend, also named Bridget, who has organized a celebration in Europe of the Irish Saint Bridget to match that of Saint Patrick. I have told her of standing in front of an enormous 12th century manuscript written in the Mugello of saints’ legends composed by Saint Donatus, the Irish pilgrim who was elected Bishop of Fiesole, 829. He is the first to tell the legend in Latin poetry of how Saint Bridget one day was caught in a great rainstorm, her cloak soaking wet. So she hung it on a sunbeam to dry. A legend like St Benedict’s vision, St Gregory tells in the Dialogues, of the entire cosmos in one beam of light. And that Seamus Heaney retells in a poem of a wet garment laid on a fluorescent bathroom light to dry.

Bishop Donatus of Fiesole [876], the fellow-countryman of Colman, seems to have taken up the challenge.

Il Vescovo Donato di Fiesole, il compatriota di Colman pare abbia raccolto la sfida.

The Laurentian Library manuscript open to the miracle story of St Brigit hanging her cloak on a sunbeam to dry.

Saint Donatus had as his archdeacon in Fiesole, Saint Andrew, also from Ireland, who built the church below Harvard’s I Tatti of San Martino a Mensola, the scenes of his life painted on its altar by Fra Angelico. Saint Andrew then became a hermit at Sasso, his sister, another Irish Saint Bridget, living below his cave in another cave down the mountain and teaching the pagan inhabitants to Bible, thus founding the town of Santa Brigida. A tale that mirrors that of the twins, Saint Benedict and Saint Scholastica at Subiaco, Scholastica’s dates being 480-547.

In the Renaissance, 2 July 1484, at Saint Andrew’s Sasso, two Ricoveri shepherdesses will have a vision of the Madonna telling them to tell Florence to read the Gospel. They are not believed. So the Madonna next appears to the grownups, telling them to believe the children. Girolamo Savonarola had come to Florence’s Dominican San Marco in 1482, and would die in flames in the Piazza della Signoria in 1498.

Andrea Verrocchio, “Sacred Conversation, Madonna with St John the Baptist, Patron of Florence, and St Donatus, Patron of Fiesole”, Collection, Pistoia Cathedral.

I take all these stories with the Bollandists’ ‘pinch of salt’, while combining theology and neuroscience, but am entranced by them. We are in this ‘Sacred Conversation’ painting by Andrea Verrocchio. We stand within its frame, not outside of it, we are improbably in Fiesole with John the Baptist and Mary and her Child from distant Palestine, from the first century, and also with Saint Donatus from distant Ireland, from the ninth century, ourselves standing on its gorgeous Islamic carpet, defying logic in our collapsing and transcending of time and space and culture, to all of us being here and now in Tuscany.

aint Birgitta of Sweden is often called Saint Bridget, and Saint Bride. (My book on her is titled, Saint Bride and her Book: Birgitta of Sweden’s Revelations, published by Cambridge’s Boydell and Brewer in Professor Jane Chance’s series on medieval women writers.) Thus she echoes also Saint Bridget of Ireland. Birgitta of Sweden was of Pan-European importance. Daughter of Lawman Birger Persson, she was forced to marry Lawman Ulf Gudmarson and bore him eight children. She learned Latin, not very well, with her children’s tutor. She made her husband pilgrimage with her to Trondheim and to Compostela. In 1342, he fell ill in Arras, the same year Niccolò Acciaiuoli founded the Certosa and Queen Giovanna married Andrew of Hungary. Birgitta’s vision in Arras had St Denis tell her to make peace of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. She was widowed in 1344, living beside the Alvastra Cistercian monastery, the monks rejecting her until one has that vision of her with the seven tiarad crown of the Holy Spirit. She sent Bishop Hemming of Åbo and Petrus Olavi of Alvastra to King Edward III of England and King Philip VI of France and Pope Clement VI in Avignon with copies of her Revelationes in progress (Bride, p. 112). She composed the Rule of the Order for Vadstena of the Holy Saviour. In 1347 she told King Magnus the vision she had of Christ as Ploughman ploughing under Sweden (Revelationes IV-37; Bride, p. 35). In 1349, the Black Death coming, she left for Rome arriving in the Jubilee year of 1350. She ordered the Pope to return from Avignon, saying lightning would strike the bells of St Peters and he would die if he disobeyed. The bells melted, 2 December, and he died, 6 December 1362 (Bride, pp. 13, 111-112). In 1367, she raised the child of Gentile Orsini from the dead by placing her cloak over his body. She brought Pope Urban V and the Emperor together in Rome, 1368. She journeyed to the Holy Land in 1372, copying there the visions Saint Jerome described Saint Paula had, returning by way of Naples to Rome where she died, 23 July 1373. She was Canonized as a Saint, 7 October 1391.1 Solidarity began in her church in Gdansk.

A large section of the Revelationes is where Mary tells Birgitta of her Cloak of Humility sheltering all (Revelationes II.23; Bride, pp. 91-93). The board, still there in the room where she lived, wrote, prayed and died, and on which her body was laid out, was written about in Julian of Norwich’s Showing of Love, and Margery Kempe saw it in 1415.

Also Birgitta’s cloak which she wore, survives as a sacred relic, patchworked together from a woman’s dress, in which she had begged with the beggars outside San Lorenzo in Panisperna while mending their clothing (Bride, pp. 6, 15).2

Birgitta's own spirituality was much shaped by Cistercian, Franciscan and Dominican contemplative practices, her acquaintance with Carthusianism coming about through channeling Niccolò's guilty conscience over his inordinate wealth in Naples to the continuance of the Certosa as a place of prayer for his soul in his natal Florence. Throughout her Book IV of the Revelationes in which she recounts the vision of Niccolò Acciaiuoli’s death bed and Mary’s cloak she refers to the amici dei, the Friends of God, who are the Dominican movement networking throughout Europe for peace, involving women and men contemplatives (Bride, p. 115).3 I give here Henry Suso and Elsbeth Stagel under Wisdom’s cloak, from the autograph manuscript of his Horologium Sapientiae at Einsiedeln which its librarian, Odo Lang OSB, provided for this research. Einsiedeln igself was founded by the Irish pilgrim hermit, St Meinrad.

Saint Birgitta of Sweden’s Revelationes recounted her vision in Naples, 6 November 1365, at Niccolò Acciaiuoli’s deathbed, of the Certosa in Florence, as under the cloak of the Madonna della Misericordia, in the image particularly ubiquitous in Florence. Birgitta in Naples prophesied to Lapa Acciaiuoli Buondelmonte, Niccolò’s sister, 6/11/1365, about his death, that would take place two days later, including this in her Revelationes IV, Chapter 7 (Bride, pp. 16, 50-57):

Visio mirabilis et notanda de quadam anima [Niccolò Acciaiuoli] iudicanda et de Dyaboli accusacionibus et virginis gloriose aduocacionibus et de exposicione ipsius visionis, in qua celum per palacium, Christus per solem, virgo per mulierem, Dyabolus per Ethiopem, angelus per militem designantur; et in qua duo loca penarum irremediabilia et tria remediabilia computantur et multa alia mirabilia et quam maxime de suffragiis.

The woodcuts to the Lübeck: Bartholomaeus Ghotan, 1492, editio princeps of the Revelationes would echo this inclusiveness, showing the enthroned Saint presenting her book from Mary and Christ to us, with the laity at her feet in prayer, over them churchmen and statesmen, and then the hierarchies of angels about the enthroned Mary and Christ in the Heavens.

And then these Irish scholars came to Tuscany, to Florence's Certosa, to the City and Book: Alphabet and Bible international conference, held by SISMEL and the Aureo Anello Associazione.

JBH, Bernard Meehan, Maire Herbert, Rev Martin McNamara at the Certosa, Florence

Father Martin McNamara, Maire Herbert at the cave of Santa Brigida, Santa Brigida

NOTES

1 Acta Sanctorum, Oct 4, 514F-515A; .André Vauchez; La sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Age : d’après le procès de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques (Roma : Ecole Française de Rome, Palais Farnese, 1981), sees the importance of the voices and stories in canonization trials as windows onto otherwise historically unknown persons, this being particularly true in Birgitta’s case where we hear of cases like Elsebi Snara giving birth to a dead child who then on prayers to St Birgitta, becomes warm and alive.

2 Thomas Gascoigne, Chancellor of Oxford University, Bodleian Digby 1728 manuscript, fol. 37^r, writes of Bride dying on the miserable board of poverty, covered by her ancient and mended mantle, “coperto de super antiquo et emendato mantello”; Aron Andersson and Anne Marie Franzén, Birgittareliker (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1975) gives other relics such as the bowl and walking stick, which I have held in my hands at Altomünster, her hair shirt, and the Spanish manuscript of Liber de modo bene vivendi ad sororem, held often by her, and once by me where it now is, in Uppsala University’s Library. Also the cap Saint Catherine of Sweden is seen to wear in the Via Veritatis fresco survives as a relic.

3 Rufus M. Jones, The Flowering of Mysticism: The Friends of God in the Fourteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1939).

JULIAN OF NORWICH, HER SHOWING OF LOVE AND ITS CONTEXTS ©1997-2024 JULIA BOLTON HOLLOWAY || JULIAN OF NORWICH || SHOWING OF LOVE || HER TEXTS || HER SELF || ABOUT HER TEXTS || BEFORE JULIAN || HER CONTEMPORARIES || AFTER JULIAN || JULIAN IN OUR TIME || ST BRIGID OF IRELAND || ST BIRGITTA OF SWEDEN || BIBLE AND WOMEN || EQUALLY IN GOD'S IMAGE || MIRROR OF SAINTS || BENEDICTINISM|| THE CLOISTER || ITS SCRIPTORIUM || AMHERST MANUSCRIPT || PRAYER|| CATALOGUE AND PORTFOLIO (HANDCRAFTS, BOOKS ) || BOOK REVIEWS || BIBLIOGRAPHY ||