Brigid of Kildare: Stabilizing a Female Saint for Early Modern Catholic Devotion
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• • Brigid of Kildare: Stabilizing a Female Saint for Early Modern Catholic Devotion John McCafferty University College Dublin Dublin, Ireland In 1571 Edmund Campion, a Londoner, wrote of the burial of the three patron saints of Ireland: “Cambrensis tellythe in sainct Patrickes tyme flo- reshid St. Bryde the vrygyn and St. Colme in Don, where there bodys sone after the conquest and also saynct Patrickes body were fonde.” In the very same year Richard Stanihurst, a Dubliner, captured the popular verse ver- sion of the same: Three bodies lie buried in Down’s hill, Patrick, Brigid and Colmcille.1 Thirty- six years later, in a papal brief lamenting the sorrows of the Irish people and lauding their constancy, Paul V offered a plenary indulgence to those whose ancestors had won the title “island of saints” for their country. The indulgence covered the length and breadth of the island and stipulated visiting ancient pilgrimage sites such as Lough Derg along with participat- ing in the new urban sodalities.2 But the holy virgin Brigid—founder of the “Brigidanae congregationis” and abbess of Kildare, according to the 1630s Martyrology of Donegal, and dubbed “patroness of the whole common- wealth of Ireland” by the Franciscan hagiographer John Colgan—was com- pletely unnoticed by the terms of Paul V’s largesse.3 This omission might be explained by the fact that, after the break with Rome, Brigid was left with no fixed pilgrimage site.4 Yet there were other issues with this female patron of Ireland. She came into the devotion of the seventeenth- century church awkwardly and with some embarrassment. This involved repurposing her life for an early modern audience who inherited her late medieval cult, vigor- ous in Britain and on the Continent and matched by widespread popularity in Ireland.5 The English Jesuit William Good noted that people regularly swore by her.6 In Anthony Gernon’s Parrthas an Anma (Paradise of the Soul) Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 50:1, January 2020 DOI 10.1215/10829636-7986589 © 2020 by Duke University Press Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/jmems/article-pdf/50/1/53/735141/0500053.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 published by the Irish Franciscans on their press at Louvain in 1645, she is always included in the litanies in her allotted place as a female saint.7 Brigid’s real problem was not just with her lack of a popular pil- grimage site, nor with her diffuse cult; it also lay with her gender. The con- fident but brittle Irish Catholic Church of the 1620s and 1630s saw much to be uneasy about in her seventh- century Hiberno- Latin vita, which offered up a series of embarrassments — uncomfortable hints of much more than an enclosed abbess’s circumscribed authority: a double monastery of both men and women; the Eucharistic practice of utraquism; the church of Kildare’s putative metropolitan status despite Armagh’s hegemony; not to mention a cascade of miracles involving pigs, sheep, goats, ducks, and other animals.8 This flamboyant disruptiveness cried out for correction if she was to retain her proper status as a patron of Ireland in a Catholic Church that was busy reforming and repurposing itself. Brigid badly needed a saintly facelift, espe- cially as her Continental fame had ushered that seventh- century vita attrib- uted to the Irish writer Cogitosus into print as early as 1486.9 Embarrassingly bucolic and trailing awkward hints of female ecclesiastical authority, Brigid made apologists for Ireland as insula sanctorum squirm a little, but she was still one of the three wonder- workers and patrons of Ireland and she enjoyed a popular living cult; relegating her to a diminished status was not an option to be contemplated. Counter- Reformation saints had to work for their liv- ing, as the cult of the saints constituted one of the fracture points between Catholics and Protestants.10 Robert Rochford, a Franciscan from Meath, defiantly set forth his hero Patrick: “the proudest Achilles of the Protestant side, unless he be moone- sicke will never presume to accept of combat on the open plain of St. Patricke’s life.”11 He studded the introduction to his English translations of Jocelin of Furness (on Patrick), Cogitosus (on Brigid), and Adomnán (on Colmcille) with gleaming examples from Patrick’s life. When it comes to Brigid, however, he is positively taciturn about her potential as an anti- Protestant figure, rendering her down to a secondary emanation of her senior: “what hitherto we have instanced . concerning S. Patricke . the same we avouch no less of S. Bridgit. [H]ow farre she was from hould- ing with Protestants, or breaking with Catholikes, her life will give ample testimony.”12 While Rochford says only this one thing about her in the dedi- catory epistle addressed to the people of Ireland in his Life of the Glorious Bishop S. Patricke, Apostle and Primate of Ireland togeather with the Lives of the Holy Virgin S. Bridgit and of the Glorious Abbot Saint Columbe, Patrons of Ireland (1625), it is still an important thing. He speaks of her “ample tes- timony.”13 It is this testimony, rather than authority, which gave rise to a 54 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 50.1 / 2020 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/jmems/article-pdf/50/1/53/735141/0500053.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Table 1. Transmission of St. Brigid’s printed vitae. Cogitosus, Vita Prima (7th c.) Mombritius, Sanctuarium (Milan, 1486) Tynemouth/Capgrave, Nova Legenda (London, 1515) Canisius, Antiquae Lectionis (Ingoldstadt, 1601 – 4) Surius, De Probatus Sanctorum (1576 – 81 et al.) Rothe, Brigida Thaumaturga (Paris, 1620) Messingham, Florilegium (Paris, 1624) Robert Rochford, The Life of . S. Patricke, . S. Bridgit and . Saint Columbe (St. Omers, 1625) depiction of this holy woman as an exemplar rather than as a validator. This article is concerned with how the early medieval abbess described in sixth- and seventh- century lives could become the very model of an early modern nun- saint. Brigid was brought into line with the nuns of a millennium later. Print led to wider dissemination of early medieval vitae. It pushed them outside their liturgical and often fairly restricted devotional contexts into the overlapping circles of humanist textual criticism, post- Reformation apologetics, and expanding vernacular pieties. Old lives were led along new paths. These paths were frequently marked out by the contemporary needs of the editors. The print history of Brigittine material is far less compli- cated than that of her counterpart, St. Patrick. That simple fact speaks elo- quently about their respective functions. No history of Ireland was complete without Patrick and his “purgatory” at Lough Derg, usually presented in highly confessional tones. Brigid was an awkward figure, a national saint who nonetheless manifested much more like a local saint. She was tricky to treat. Two of her vitae gave rise to different streams of printed transmission (see table 1). The first began with Mombritius’s edition of Cogitosus’s Vita Prima in a late fifteenth- century Milanese sanctuarium; Brigid was the first Irish saint known, in fact, to make it into print with an entire vita. This stream was then refreshed by Henricus Canisius’s publication of an Eich- stadt manuscript of Cogitosus in his Antiquae Lectionis (1601–4), which also found its way into a later edition of Laurentius Surius’s influential De Pro- batus Sanctorum (1576 – 81). As with her counterpart Patrick, editorial activ- ity peaked in the 1620s: David Rothe’s book- length sermon, Brigida Thau- McCafferty / Brigid of Kildare 55 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/jmems/article-pdf/50/1/53/735141/0500053.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 maturga (1620); Thomas Messingham’s Florilegium Insulae Sanctorum seu Vitae et Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae (1624), a compendium of the lives of Irish saints; and Rochford’s English- language version of the lives of Ireland’s three patrons. The second stream also depended on the continuing popularity of high medieval legendaria. In this case, the origin is John of Tynemouth, operating in the fourteenth century, who drew on the seventh- century Vita Prima for his Sanctilogium Angliae, Walliae, Scotiae et Hiberniae. A version of this work, Nova Legenda Anglie, came into print in 1515 (followed by a highly condensed English language translation in 1516).14 The Nova Legenda was also reproduced, vitally for the Catholic Brigid, by Messingham in his Flo- rilegium.15 A year later, Robert Rochford used the Florilegium without any acknowledgment. By mingling both printed streams he syncretized Brigid for the seventeenth century.16 Every single early modern life or short notice of Brigid refers to the miracle of the greenwood altar. This sign was given, significantly, on her veiling day when part of the altar became as living green wood at her touch. It evoked both the tree of life, as well as images of regrowth and renewal. The symbolism of the miracle complemented pride in the extent of her cult all over Europe. This in turn linked Brigid to a double proposition beloved of Irish Catholic authors of spiritual works: first, that the Catholic Church was in no need of reform because it had renewed itself again and again in every century; second, that Ireland through its exceptional purity of faith had driven European reform at critical moments. The proof was in the holy effluence of the insula sanctorum — the peregrini, founders of Continental monasteries and disseminators of the cults of their patrons.17 Brigid was a witness to that vitality, which was symbolically manifested in the vigor she imparted to the altar. A series of early modern discoveries of manuscripts of Cogitosus in Continental monasteries could be adduced as further proof of the enduring importance of the early medieval Irish Church.