Brigid of Kildare: Stabilizing a Female Saint for Early Modern Catholic Devotion

Home , Brigid of Kildare, James Ussher, John Colgan, Richard Stanihurst

•

• 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 version 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)

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 pilgrimage 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, especially as her Continental fame had ushered that seventh-century vita attributed 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 living, 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 testimony.”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. This also linked the new scholarly exiles to the great tradition of Irish scholarship on the Continent.18 Just as the English Cistercian hagiographer Jocelin of Furness became the dominant source for mid-seventeenth-century scholars of St. Patrick, so Cogitosus became the authoritative biographer for Brigid. There were several reasons for this development. Cogitosus’s was the first medieval Irish hagiography into print. Cardinal Baronius gave him his imprimatur in his Annales Ecclesiasticae (1588 – 1607). Henricius Canisius, writing in the first years of the seventeenth century and seizing on the phrase “orate pro me cogitoso

56 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 nepote culpabili,” launched a discussion as to whether the hagiographer was, in fact, Brigid’s own nephew.19 All of this conferred authenticity and antiq- uity upon Cogitosus and gave his vita what appeared to be the most secure historical anchor. Messingham, Rochford, and Colgan all duly decided that Cogitosus was the senior source.20 Unlike the other two, though, Rochford used the anchor to moor a new kind of vessel. The Franciscan Rochford produced a modern English version of Brigid’s life in ten chapters by quietly purging her of embarrassments and awkwardnesses. This was not an antiquarian text; it was a devotional one, designed to be read and used by preachers, male and female religious, and the faithful in general. As such it is the place where much of Brigid’s refash- ioning can now be sorted out. It appeared first in 1625 as part of a volume with nineteen pages of introductory material and Rochford’s simultaneous reworkings of the lives of Patrick and Colmcille. It appeared again in 1636 as a supplement to an English edition of Alfonso de Villegas’s very popular Liues of the Saints.21 This book appears to have been circulated widely in Ireland.22 Robert Rochford himself received the Franciscan habit in Louvain in September 1616, taking the name “Robert of St. Brigit” which suggests a particular interest in Brigid. He was ordained priest by Archbishop Florence Conry, a fellow friar and a major architect of the Irish Franciscan religio- literary enterprise, in December 1621. Rochford then went on to lecture on philosophy in Spain.23 His book of refashioned stories of the three patrons of Ireland was conceived and written in the Spanish Netherlands, one of the first fruits of the Irish hagiographical enterprise of Louvain.24 Here was a region teeming with Irish and English recusant exiles and a powerhouse of Catholic reformation. Antwerp poured out vast numbers of devotional prints and pamphlets. Archduchess Isabella Clara Eugenia dressed as a Fran- ciscan tertiary after the death of her husband in 1621. Crucifixes bled, blind people saw, the dumb spoke, devils assailed nuns and were exorcised.25 In the midst of all of this fervor, Rochford went to work. He now gave Brigid a more edifying childhood than that offered by his main authority Cogitosus, and he “improved” her death. He systematized her acta into pointedly edifying chapters and simply suppressed what he did not like. Table 2 shows how he blended the Nova Legenda (the source for a mediated Vita Prima) with Cogitosus. The chapter titles not only guided the reader to points of particular interest, but they also replaced the somewhat picaresque structure of the miracle-rich originals with something that was as close to an exemplary biography as possible.

McCafferty / Brigid of Kildare 57

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/jmems/article-pdf/50/1/53/735141/0500053.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Table 2. Rochford’s blending of chapters from John of Tynemouth’s Nova Legenda (T) and Cogitosus’s Vita Prima (C) for his biography of St. Brigid.

Chap. 1, “Of S. Brigits Countrey, Parents, Birth” 1.1 T1 1.2 T1 1.3 T2 C1.4 – 8 1.4 T3

Chap. 2, “Of S. Brigits singuler chastity” 2.1 T4 C2.1 – 3 2.2 T5 C8.1 – 3 2.3 T6 2.4 T8

Chap. 3, “Of S. Brigits great austerity” 3.1 T20 3.2 C5.1 – 3 3.3 T29 C3.1 – 3 3.4 T14 C16.1 – 2 3.5 T30 C26.1 – 4

Chap. 4, “Of the great power S. Brigit had over Divells” 4.1 T12 4.2 T17 4.3 T7 4.4 C24.1 – 3

Chap. 5, “Of the obedience that unreasonable creatures exhibited to Saint Bridgit” 5.1 T26b C21.1 – 4 5.2 T26 C20.1-8 5.3 T9 – 10 5.4 T15

Chap. 6, “How S. Bridgit protected . . . such as invocated her” 6.1 T19 6.2 T21 6.3 C25.1 – 6 6.4 C30.1 – 6

Chap. 7, “Of many miraculous cures . . . and intercessions of the Saint” 7.1 T18 7.2 T24 – 25 7.3 T22 7.4 T26b C29.1 – 3

58 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 2. (continued)

Chap. 8, “How the holy Virgin for the relief of the poore, wrought many admirable signes” 8.1 T13 8.2 T30 C27.1 – 4 8.3 C28.1 – 4 8.4 T23 C7.1 – 5

Chap. 9, “How the holy virgin, declared the innocency of Bishop Broon” 9.1 T11 9.2 T23 C23.2 – 3 9.3 T23 C4.1 – 2 9.4 C6.1 – 4

Chap. 10, “Of S. Bridgits happy departure out of this life” 10.1 T31 10.2 C31.1 – 10 10.3 C31.1 – 11 10.4 C32.1, 4 – 8

One short example from the accounts of Brigid’s childhood gives a sense of how this effect was achieved by making very old materials work in various ways with their early modern readership. Rochford begins by selecting the account of her birth and childhood from Tynemouth’s condensed Vita Prima. This allowed him to suppress Cogitosus’s awkward preface which laid claim to a primacy for Kildare and which evoked a disquieting female authority within its paruchia or ecclesiastical federation.26 Brigid is now re-presented as a base slave girl serving, as Rochford translates it, in a “magician’s house.”27 Brigid’s decision to sell her father’s sword to provide alms for the poor provokes her father into attempting to sell her to the king. The latter declares, however, “[Y]our daughter is of too great worth to be bought by me, and of farre greater to be sould by you.”28 So even in the very opening scenes of his translation, Rochford has suppressed any material which might cause embarrassment or disquiet. He has already touched lightly on holiness in the midst of the “uncleane” and on a sovereign’s refusal to purchase as a salutary affirmation of the importance of touching neither oblates nor oblations. Attentive readers might also see in these episodes a commentary, respectively, on the strains of living among heretics and on the issue of dissolved monasteries. It is likely that this sort of reading was part of Rochford’s intention since his marginalia to his reworking of Jocelin of Furness’s life of Patrick in the same volume regularly gloss fifth-century

McCafferty / Brigid of Kildare 59

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/jmems/article-pdf/50/1/53/735141/0500053.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 events for their applicability to contemporary religious affairs.29 Yet these are still the same miracles, give or take some trimming, as in the medieval accounts. With his translation, Rochford manages to manufacture evocations of contemporary Irish religious culture from an Irish seventh-century text. His reordering positions Brigid to resonate with other early modern lives of female saints, especially those women who had been very recently canonized, and by doing so to engage with current preoccupations with female sanctity and sexuality. Three of Rochford’s headings not only refresh a saint who had died a millennium earlier but propel her forward as an authentic holy woman for his own time. Each of the chapters on her “singuler chastity,” her “great austerity,” and her “great power over divells” give her an especially contemporary resonance and charge.30 These were the very same qualities emphasized in the biographies of Francesca of Rome, a married noblewoman born in 1384 and canonized in 1606, and of her much more famous counterpart, Teresa of Avila, who was canonized in 1622 alongside Francis Xavier and Ignatius Loyola.31 In many respects, Rochford’s life of Brigid reads as a retrofitted cause for canonization, bringing a saint long recognized by popular cult into greater harmony with female peers who had recently passed through the rigorous and diligently documented procedures of the Roman congregation.32 Sanctity was rooted in triumph over the world, the flesh, and the devil, and especially over human sexuality. The latter was especially vaunted in female saints. Brigid’s “character castitatis” matched Teresa’s sobriquet of “the treasurer of virginity” and Francesca’s coldly compliant sexuality, simul- taneously fulfilling the marital debt required by canon law and convincing her husband of the merits of celibacy.33 Female saintliness was best expressed in the cloister, but it was also prefigured in the character-establishing early years of a girl’s life. In each case, these three holy women, whether in the womb or as toddlers, gave early testimony to their anchoritic spirit by vari- ously shunning childish games, by manufacturing flickers of fire or light, by constructing altars or hermitages, or by seeking to convert the Moors.34 Their childish innocence deliberately foreshadows their adult chastity. Brigid vomits in the house of a magician, Francesca vomits every time she eats because of her tussles with the devil of concupiscence, and Teresa expe- riences “extreme sickness” when her novitiate is interrupted.35 Their innate purity can endure neither disruption nor distraction without corporeal reac- tion. A variety of parallels can be found across all three of these lives. Brigid’s lustful nun, who resorts, after invoking the saint, to burning her feet with

60 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 coals, is matched by Teresa’s prurient priest who, ensnared by maleficium or sorcery into an erotic obsession with a woman, is cured by throwing away a copper token on the saint’s advice.36 In each case, the wise abbess assists the client in mastering lust through a decisive physical but nonsexual act. Before she becomes a nun, Brigid’s eye is “addled,” a temporary and miraculous affliction designed to ward off a suitor. The Kildare abbess’s resort to physical alteration is matched by Jeanne Françoise de Chantal (1572 – 1641), foundress of the Visitation nuns, who tattooed the name of Jesus onto her breasts in order to avoid a suitor.37 Even for the married Francesca, true peace, control, and restraint comes only when she enters the convent. Seclu- sion would negate sexuality. For all three women saints, and for all those they encouraged — Brigid’s royal and noble female followers, Francesca’s companions and children, and those in Teresa’s many foundations — enclosure would cure the itch. Strict enclosure also happened to be promoted by the Council of Trent as the touchstone of religious life for women.38 As the Yorkshirewoman Mary Ward (1585 – 1645) discovered so painfully when her “Jesuitesses” were suppressed in 1631, the seventeenth-century hierarchy insisted on enclosed nun rather than mobile beata or holy woman. Consequently, Rochford’s Brigid lost virtually every shred of her earlier peripatetic character through judicious omission of place and dynastic names, so gaining prized stabilitas or stability in the process.39 The newly stabilized Brigid was being remade for a new age of heroic but enclosed virginity, just as at the same time the early Christians whose bodies were rediscovered in the catacombs of Rome were being remade for a new age of martyrdom.40 Yet convent containment did bring its own demons. The chapter entitled “Of the great power S. Brigit had over Divels, & how much they feared her” not only did ample justice to the Vita Prima’s characterization, but it also had two other important functions.41 Exorcism was deployed by the Counter-Reformation church as an especially startling proof of authority. St. Peter Canisius (who was, incidentally, uncle of Henricius and patron of Laurentius Surius, both editors of lives of Brigid) owes his reputation as “apostle” of Germany as much to his expulsion of demons from various members of the Fugger family of Augsburg as to his catechism.42 Demons caused heretics to recant, but sadly, and as their nature demanded, they worked without discrimination. They had a nasty habit of latching on to communities of women whose intense physical mortifications, austerity, and contiguity made them vulnerable to restless lascivious spirits. Teresa herself was suspected of false prophecy and demonic possession.43 Closer to Rochford’s own base, the Brigittine nuns

McCafferty / Brigid of Kildare 61

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/jmems/article-pdf/50/1/53/735141/0500053.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 at Lille were troubled throughout the 1610s by poltergeists, black sabbaths, and various sexual perversions.44 Women saints were therefore required to repel spirits as effectively as the convent walls repelled suitors. Again Brig- id’s remodeled early lives caught the mood: her mere approach, like that of Teresa and Francesca, caused unclean spirits to flee.45 Early modern fiends occasionally performed polemical stints by freely testifying to the rottenness of Luther or Calvin and their adherents or bringing the happy news from the beyond that the reformers were now in torment.46 An “obsessed” (by which Rochford means “possessed”) and furious man must obey Brigid’s com- mand to “preach the word of our saviour Jesus Christ.” The allusion could have hardly been lost on Rochford’s pious readers who had been schooled to believe that authority over demons was a mark of the truly apostolic church and was lacking in its “false” rivals.47 Convent life of strict enclosure only worked if it was rooted in dis- cipline and self-denial. This, of course, was the inspiration behind Teresa’s reformed discalced Carmelites. While holy women worked out their spiritual struggles on their flesh, Teresa herself in her Vida insisted on the need for balance. Two kinds of miracle addressed this concern. The first of these was an old trope of supernatural provision: crabs for a woman with a pregnancy craving in Francesca’s Rome and Brigid’s homely provisions of honey, beer, wheat, and bacon out of the usual season or out of nowhere.48 These mini-cornucopias had pleasing evangelical connotations but also concret- ized the importance of breaking fasts with judicious feastings. The second kind of balance concerned excesses in austere behaviors. A wise superior kept her charges vigilant as Brigid did when she made one demon of sloth visible or when she restrained her own self from excessive devotion.49 Francesca abandoned her hairshirt when advised by her confessor, and Teresa remem- bered that meat was actually meant for nourishment.50 God arranged for a pool to dry up where Brigid went to meditate, in order to prevent inappro- priate morbidness.51 Those who read or heard Rochford’s English life of Brigid were enabled to recalibrate her as a contemporary female saint who accorded with recently canonized exemplars. The effect, though, depended as much on omission as amalgamation. Some elisions were accidental byproducts of Rochford’s dependence on the Nova Legenda.52 All but two sections of Tynemouth’s version of Vita Prima appear in this 1625 publication. The missing parts are an incident in which Brigid has a vision of a billy goat in the Communion chalice and a scene in which Brigid, Patrick, and their followers fall into a three-day trance of preaching.53 Both of these episodes

62 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 required judicious excision for a contemporary audience of the faithful. The Eucharist, and its scriptural basis, meaning, and performance, was at the fast-beating heart of the Reformation crisis. Brigid’s close sight of a chalice implied utraquism, that is, Eucharistic reception of both bread and wine, which was definitively a Protestant practice by the time Rochford appeared in print. So it was best avoided. Furthermore, the appearance — in any form — of a foul beast at Mass sailed too close to a sectarian invective in which Protestant writers claimed diabolical bestial appearances at what they called the “Babylonian” sacrifice of the Mass, and which Catholics such as Dubliner Henry Fitzsimon, S.J. riposted by alleging that “heretics” blas- phemed by using black turnips, cheese, or even human sperm as Eucharistic elements.54 In the source text here, Vita Prima, an acolyte’s slaughter of a stolen goat triggers Brigid’s vision in the chalice. His subsequent confession to the bishop restores normality. A further seventeenth-century snag was that Catholics such as Fitzsimon made so much of the dignity and duty of altar service that even a sinful acolyte raised a dread specter of an actively sinful priest, which made for grave discomfort in a religious environment where pastoral quality was a central reform issue. Again it was best to let the whole scene drop. The preaching trance was removed, in part, because of the ripples caused by illuminism and false ecstasies among both women and men.55 Contemporary hagiographers preferred women saints to be influential advisors to bishops and priests but recoiled from any hint of female pub- lic preaching. The work of “tidying up” Brigid and, indeed, many other saints, really began in the aftermath of Luther’s break with Rome when both popular iconoclasm and theological reflection had sought to present their cults as fantastical accretions. Rochford benefited from this gradual recalibration of older dossiers and devotions. Henricius Canisius’s edition had already spared him embarrassment by excising Cogitosus’s account of a pregnant nun — something that the Protestant Dubliner James Ussher gleefully seized upon to trounce medieval hagiographers and contemporary Catholic editors all at once.56 In the original story, Brigid’s mere touch on the belly of a nun literally undoes her pregnancy. Another pregnancy story did survive given its edifying possibilities. Here a woman maliciously accuses Bishop Broon, dis- ciple of St. Patrick, of fathering her child; her head is swollen to speechless- ness by Brigid’s signing the cross on her mouth. The infant, whose tongue is blessed by the saint, reveals that Broon is not the father. This was at once a set-piece demonstration of the power of the sign of the cross as well as a defense of episcopal probity.57 While the signum crucis was a beloved trope

McCafferty / Brigid of Kildare 63

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/jmems/article-pdf/50/1/53/735141/0500053.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 of Catholic missionaries, Bishop Broon himself gave Meredith Hanmer, a Welsh minister in the Church of Ireland (conflating both of the above stories) a chance to declare, with heavy irony, in his account that just one single miracle in Brigid’s legends was true — the miracle of her getting a guilty bishop off the hook by some deft in utero magic.58 On the whole, though, the Kildare abbess was a poor subject for controversy, and while Ussher and Hanmer did spar just a little, Rochford was careful to close off all idle speculation on the part of the faithful.59 He had already eliminated Cogi- tosus’s preface that promoted the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Kildare, and he explicitly (and this is the only time he does so) boiled down the extensive descriptive passages in the closing sections of the original.60 The seventh- century text provides proud descriptions of a lavish double monastery (of both monks and nuns) with status as a place of refuge for the whole island and treasury of kings, in order to give rich texture to its claims for primatial status. As Rochford excised these features, he downgraded Kildare still further by calling the church an oratory. In Rochford’s hands, the deluxe archiepiscopal double monastery of the seventh century was transformed into a sumptuously decorated but safe convent oratory. Kildare’s communal life a millennium earlier was bent into the shape of convent life in the seventeenth century. The true church, in other words, as exemplified by this female patron of Ireland was shown to be unchanging, unperturbed, and devoid of disquieting novelty no matter how far back in the past the reader cared to look. Brigid, like so many early medieval saints, was subsumed into a Catholic discourse about triumphant continuity. The depiction of Brigid in early modern print made the very same point. If it were not for the caption “S. Brigida Virgo Kildariensis Hiber- niae Patrona” on the portrait in Messingham’s Florilegium (see fig. 1), the image of Brigid is so generic that she could be Angela Merici (founder of the Ursulines) or Jeanne Françoise de Chantal (founder of the Visitandines). A seventeenth-century print by Abraham van Diepenbeeck (see fig. 2) styles her as a Canoness Regular of St. Augustine, a common early modern device for dealing with figures from early medieval monasteries who belonged to no recognizable order.61 Rochford was resourceful and nimble in giving Brigid her Triden- tine facelift, but he was not acting alone. For example, John Colgan, who assembled the most definitive dossiers of the early saints, offers in his Tri- adis Thaumaturgae a selection of offices for Brigid’s feast day of February 1, starting with those from a 1620 compilation by David Rothe, bishop of Ossory, then moving back through time. Earlier offices retain vestiges of the

64 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 Figure 1. Portrait of St. Brigid. Thomas Messingham, Florilegium Insulae Sanctorum seu Vitae et Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae (Paris, 1624), 189. Courtesy of the University College Dublin – O.F.M. partnership.

McCafferty / Brigid of Kildare 65

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/jmems/article-pdf/50/1/53/735141/0500053.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Figure 2. Print of St. Brigid by Abraham van Diepenbeeck. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, object no. RP-P-OB-23.303. Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum.

66 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 quasi-primatial assertions and emphasize bucolic thaumaturgy, but by 1620 she is the greenwood virgin, the “rosa temperentiae” [rose of self-control], a bride of Christ for a universal Church whom another saint refers to as “haec altera Maria, qui habitat inter nos” [this other Mary, who dwelt among us (the Irish)].62 Yet Brigid’s Marian characteristics conferred on her no special status, because when the three patrons of Ireland are presented together by Colgan and Messingham on the respective title pages of their publications, they are rearranged from the traditional and chronological order — Patrick, Brigid, and Colmcille — to a new hierarchy of Patrick, Colmcille, and Brigid; that is, bishop, abbot, abbess. It is a tiny but deft adjustment that puts the Kildare saint in her “proper” place. When the English Benedictine exile Fr. Jerome Porter’s Flowers of the Lives of the most renowned Saincts of the Three Kingdoms England Scot- land, and Ireland appeared in Douai in 1632, Brigid in all her Counter- Reformation sexual, moral, and Roman mode had been fully re-formed. Brigid’s life as “a fraile vessel of a poore bondeslave girl” was for Porter a prime example of heroic virginity even at the cost of self-mutilation.63 Her love of virtue rules her life, and she is Teresian in her impulses and in the language used to express them: “Brigit who desired Jesus Christ as her only dear spouse.”64 Porter attempts to overcome the lingering and slight embarrassment of the undying sacred fire at Kildare tended by nuns and forbidden to men — first attested by Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century — by turning it into a metaphor of strict enclosure.65 Another of Brigid’s miracles is also useful for a sectarian sideswipe. During the course of a vicious local feud, the saint persuades God to create a perfect simulacrum of one intended victim which the other side then proceeds to “kill” without of course doing any real damage: “on the day appointed when they went about to act this blouddie scene, they saw the verie forme and figure of the man they meant to murder and taking a figure for the body as( Protestants doe) they ran after it with great furie.”66 Suddenly, then, an old miracle is used as a passing barb in the acrimonious Reformation debate about transubstantiation. Porter’s printed marginalia summing up in a word or two the contents of particular episodes are revealing: Brigid is a moral saint; she works in the realms of conscience, order, and harmony. She cures only physical manifestations of inner disorder — leprosy, blindness, deafness. There are no animal miracles, and her manifold miracles of plenty are compressed to one line. Brigid is now contained within an early modern framework: she has become a virgin’s virgin, an abbess’s abbess, an exemplar of wise enclosure and governance. In the Franciscan Mícheál Ó Cléirigh’s autograph copy of the Martyrology of

McCafferty / Brigid of Kildare 67

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/jmems/article-pdf/50/1/53/735141/0500053.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Donegal compiled in the 1630s, he notes “a very ancient old book of vellum in which is found the martyrology of Maelruain of Tamlacht . . . states that Brighit was following the manners and the life which holy Mary, mother of Jesus had.”67 But Mary herself, like Brigid, had been recharacterized over the centuries, as Rochford knew well when he closed his life of Brigid with a petition: “May God of his inifinit grace conduct us all to him, to his immaculate mother, and to the two glorious patrons of Ireland, S. Patricke and S. Brigit, be all honour, glory, and prayse, world without end.”68 Here, Brigid is neatly positioned alongside Patrick in conjunction with Mary as the Immaculata, placing her at the heart of an Irish Franciscan campaign to recognize Patrick as a universal saint and to establish the doctrinal status of the Immaculate Conception. Nobody, as it happens, promoted the cult of Maria Immaculata more assiduously than Rochford’s sovereign, Philip IV. As the Blessed Vir- gin’s immaculate conception embedded itself more firmly into Catholic doc- trine, the representation of Brigid shifted from being an imitator Christi to an imitator Mariae with all the transformation this entailed. The lives of Brigid and other Irish saints becoming available in print was a literary equiv- alent to the vast discoveries of bones of early Christian martyrs in Rome, which gave a solidity to a church in the process of an ebullient redefinition of itself. Rochford’s life of Brigid fulfilled the ambition of contemporary Catholic hagiographers who did not want the insula sanctorum to be left behind. Nine hundred or a thousand years separated the Vita Prima from Messingham, Rochford, and Porter, but by the mid-seventeenth century, Brigid of Kildare, securely enclosed and stabilized, was remade in a most useful pastoral and doctrinal image for a renewed and reforming Catholic Church.

•

Notes 1 A. F. Vossen, ed., Two Bokes of the Histories of Ireland (Assen, Neth.: Von Gorum, 1973), 50; Colm Lennon, Richard Stanihurst the Dubliner, 1547 – 1618 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1981), 142. 2 John O’Hagan, “Miscellanea Vaticano-Hibernica,” Archivium Hibernicum 3 (1914): 227 – 365, at 263 – 64. See also John McCafferty, “The Communion of Saints and Catholic Reformation in Early Seventeenth-Century Ireland,” in Community in Early Modern Ireland, ed. Robert Armstrong and Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006), 199 – 214. A sodality is a guild established for religious purposes

68 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 to carry out a common action or give mutual assistance. They would meet weekly with communal devotions. 3 Mícheál Ó Cléirigh, The Martyrology of Donegal, ed. J. H. Todd and W. Reeves, trans. John O’Donovan (Dublin, 1864), 34 – 37; John Colgan, Triadis Thaumaturgae seu divorum Patricii Columbae et Brigidae . . . Acta (Louvain, 1647). 4 The commemoration of Brigid was limited to one of the several named penitential “beds” (ruins of monastic oratories) at the pilgrimage site of Lough Derg, a side-effect of Patrick’s cult, and to a disputed invention and translation of her relics to Down patrick. For a comprehensive modern overview of Brigid and her subsequent cult, see T. M. Charles-Edwards, “Brigit [St. Brigit, Brigid] (439/452 – 524/526),” Oxford Dic- tionary of National Biography, Sept. 23, 2004, at doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/3427. 5 Donnchadh Ó Corráin, Clavis Litterarum Hibernensium: Medieval Irish Books and Texts c. 400 – c. 1600, 3 vols. (Turnhout, Belg.: Brepols, 2017), 1:274 – 79, gives a comprehensive guide to the literature on the extent of her cult in the Middle Ages and those issues which have engaged medieval historians. Robert Bartlett points out that she was more popular than St. Patrick; see “Cults of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh Saints in Twelfth-Century England,” in Britain and Ireland, 900 – 1300: Insular Responses to Medieval European Change, ed. Brendan Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1999), 67 – 86. The English Martyrologe (St. Omer, 1608), 29 – 30, records almost nothing of her life but carefully links her to churches in London and across the islands of Britain and Ireland. 6 William Camden, Britain, or A Chorographicall Description of the most Flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland (London, 1610), 145. 7 Anselm Ó Fachtna, ed., Parrthas an Anma (Baile Átha Cliath/Dublin: Institúid Árd- Léinn, 1953). By contrast, while Patrick makes it into the calendar of the 1637 Book of Common Prayer printed in Dublin, Brigid does not. 8 In an appendix to his lives of Brigid in Triadis Thaumaturga, 653 – 58, John Col- gan valiantly tries to arrange these into some chronological order, but this breaks down entirely after 140 separate entries. Utraquism is reception of the Eucharist under forms of both bread and wine. Catholics, apart from those officiating at Mass, received only bread. 9 See Bernardus Mombritius, Sanctuarium seu Vitae sanctorum (Milan, 1486). For an English translation of Cogitosus’s life of Brigid, see Sean Connolly and J.-M. Picard, “Cogitosus’s ‘Life of St. Brigit’: Content and Value,” Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 117 (1987): 5 – 27. 10 McCafferty, “Communion of Saints.” 11 Fr. B. B. [Robert Rochford], The Life of the Glorious Bishop S. Patricke . . . togeather with the Lives of the Holy Virgin S. Bridgit and . . . Saint Columbe, Patrons of Ireland (St. Omers, 1625), xii. 12 Life of S. Patricke . . . with the Holy Virgin S. Bridgit, xii – xiii. 13 Life of S. Patricke . . . with the Holy Virgin S. Bridgit, xiii. 14 Many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers, including Robert Rochford, believed that the Nova Legenda was compiled by John Capgrave. There is debate about the priority of the dating of the lives. The key arguments for a seventh-century (pre-Cogitosus) date for Vita Prima are in Richard Sharpe, “Vitae S. Brigitae: The

McCafferty / Brigid of Kildare 69

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/jmems/article-pdf/50/1/53/735141/0500053.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Oldest Texts,” Peritia 1 (1982): 81 – 106. On the other hand, Kim McCone, in “Brigit in the Seventh Century: A Saint with Three Lives?,” Peritia 1 (1982): 107 – 45, argues that the life as we have it is a composite text, compiled at a later date. 15 Nova Legenda Anglie (London, 1515); The Kalendre of the Newe Legende of Englande (London, 1516). The Nova Legenda was subsequently used as a source text by James Ussher for his Britannicarum Ecclesiarum Antiquitates (Dublin, 1639). 16 Rochford, Life of S. Patricke . . . with the Holy Virgin S. Bridgit, xviii: “concerning S. Bridgits life, I have partly out of Cogitosus her nephew (as some do thinke) and partly out of Capgrave, & have my selfe distinguished it by Chapters and Paragraphes oth- erwise then it is in the Latin, thinking that the methode I observed therein, would be more for thy spirituall profit, the ornament of the worke, and her perspicuity of life it selfe.” 17 McCafferty, “Communion of Saints,” 199 – 214. 18 For discussion of the early modern afterlives of Irish hagiographies, see Richard Sharpe, Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives: An Introduction to “Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 19 Henricus Canisius, Thesaurus monumentorum ecclesiasticorum et historicum; sive, H. Canisii lectiones antiquae . . . quibus praefationes historicas, animadversiones criticas et notas . . . adjecit J. Basnage, 4 vols. (Antwerp, 1725), 1:413: “Auctor in fine his verbis suum nomen ponit: Orate pro me Cogitoso nepote culpabili. Quare autem se nepotem vocat? An nepos S. Brigidae? An hic nepos alio sensum? Certe auctor perantiquus est” [At the end the author gives his name: Pray for me Cogitosus blameworthy nephew. Why call himself nephew? Nephew of St. Brigid or nephew in another sense? Cer- tainly a truly ancient author]. 20 Colgan did insert the hymn “Ní Car Brigit,” which he attributed to Broccán, before Cogitosus in his Triadis. Counter-intuitively, the so-called Vita Prima comes third. Colgan, however, aimed at the fullest dossier possible, so he ended his Brigid section with an office for Brigid published in Paris in 1620: Officia SS. Patricii, Columbae, Brigidae et aliorum quorundam Hibernae Sanctorum (Paris, 1620). 21 Alfonso Villegas, The Liues of Saints, Written in Spanishe by the R.F. Alfonso Villegas Dominican & faithfully translated into Englishe . . . with the Liues of S. Patrick S. Brigid and S. Columba patrons of Ireland ([Rouen], 1636). This edition was clearly designed for the Irish market as it featured all three patrons of Ireland — using the same wood- cuts as for Messingham’s Insulae Sanctorum seu Vitae et Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae (Paris, 1624) — along with St. Finian of Meath on the cover. 22 Raymond Gillespie, Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland (Man- chester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 69. 23 Brendan Jennings, ed., Louvain Papers, 1606 – 1827 (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Com- mission, 1968), 57: “Ex Media . . . fr Robertus a Sta Brigida, antea dictus Rochford, receptus 8 Septembris 1616.” Brendan Jennings, O.F.M., “Irish Names in the Malines Ordination Registers, 1602 – 1749,” Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 5th ser., vol. 76 (Dec., 1951): 485; Brendan Jennings, “Documents from the Archives of St. Isidore’s College, Rome,” Analecta Hibernica 6 (1934): 216 – 17, presenting a letter in Latin from Pat- rick Fleming, O.F.M. in Louvain, Feb. 18, 1630, to Robert of St. Brigit, Theologian, in the College of St. Francis, in “Complutum” (Alcala de Henares, Spain). Rochford

70 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 also had close connections to the Poor Clares, so while his work was clearly aimed at a broad domestic audience, it was probably also used in the predominantly Anglo- phone cloister. Brendan Jennings, “Miscellaneous Documents I, 1588 – 1634,” Archiv- ium Hibernicum 12 (1946): 70 – 200, at 133 – 34: the Irish Poor Clares (discalced) at Nieuport, Belgium, to the Archduchess Isabella, undated (1627), mention Fr. Robert Rochford as preacher and their agent. This is followed by a letter from G. de Steen- huys to the secretary of the audience, requesting a passport for R. R., in accordance with the desires of the Poor Clares, to allow him to travel freely to England and Ire- land. I hope at some future point to explore connections between this translation and the translation enterprises, in both Irish and English, of the Poor Clares. See Marie- Louise Coolahan, Women, Writing, and Language in Early Modern Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 63 – 101. 24 For a larger overview of the Louvain enterprise, see essays in Edel Bhreathnach, Joseph MacMahon, and John McCafferty, eds., The Irish Franciscans, 1534 – 1990 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009). 25 See Paul Arblaster, Antwerp and the World: Richard Verstegan and the International Culture of Catholic Reformation (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2004); Craig Har- line, Miracles at the Jesus Oak (New York: Doubleday, 2003); Cordula van Wyhe, “Court and Convent: The Infanta Isabella and Her Franciscan Confessor Andrés de Soto,” Sixteenth Century Journal 35, no. 2 (2004): 411 – 45. 26 For recent analysis of the question of Kildare’s jurisdiction as seen in the lives, see Elizabeth Dawson, “Brigit and Patrick in Vita Prima Sanctae Brigitae: Veneration and Jurisdiction,” Peritia 28 (2017): 35 – 50; and Elizabeth Krajewski, “Kildare and the Kingdom of God: A New Reading of Cogitosus’ Vita Sanctae Brigitae,” Peritia 28 (2017): 91 – 112. 27 Rochford, Life of S. Patricke . . . with the Holy Virgin S. Bridgit, 107 – 8. 28 Life of S. Patricke . . . with the Holy Virgin S. Bridgit, 109 – 10. 29 A typical intervention comes as Patrick decides to answer the call of the Irish to convert them to Christianity. Here, Rochford inserts: “S. Patricke would not undergo the conversion without the Pope’s speciall leave” (Life of S. Patricke . . . with the Holy Vir- gin S. Bridgit, 13). 30 Life of S. Patricke . . . with the Holy Virgin S. Bridgit, chaps. 2, 3, and 4. 31 All of these saints and others appear in An Appendix of the Saints lately Canonized, and Beatifyed by Paule the fift, and Gregorie the Fifteenth (Douai, 1624). This text origi- nally appeared as an appendix to an edition of Alfonso Villegas, O.P.’s Flos Sancto- rum, translated by Edward Kinsman. Kinsman was also responsible for English translations of Villegas which appeared as The Lives of the Saints in 1609, 1614, 1621, 1628, 1630, 1636 — with Rochford’s Irish lives appended — and 1638. 32 Rochford, Life of S. Patricke . . . with the Holy Virgin S. Bridgit, xix. Rochford’s English-language endeavors were part of a wider enterprise for rehabilitating the early Irish Church and the innate civility of the Irish, undertaken by the Louvain Francis- cans. For the background to this, see Padraig Ó Riain, “The Louvain Achievement II: Hagiography,” in The Irish Franciscans, ed. Bhreathnach, MacMahon, and McCaf- ferty, 189 – 200. 33 Appendix of the Saints, 177, 199, 206.

McCafferty / Brigid of Kildare 71

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/jmems/article-pdf/50/1/53/735141/0500053.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 34 Rochford, Life of S. Patricke . . . with the Holy Virgin S. Bridgit, 106 – 10; Appendix of the Saints, 171 – 74, 195 – 98. 35 Rochford, Life of S. Patricke . . . with the Holy Virgin S. Bridgit, 108; Appendix of the Saints, 178, 198. 36 Rochford, Life of S. Patricke . . . with the Holy Virgin S. Bridgit, 127 – 28; Appendix of the Saints, 198 – 99. 37 R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1550 – 1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 143; Rochford, Life of S. Patricke . . . with the Holy Virgin S. Bridgit, 110. 38 25th Session of the Council of Trent, Dec. 3 – 4, 1563, Decree on Regulars and Nuns, chap. 5, in H. J. Schroeder, ed., Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent: English Translation (Rockford, Ill.: Tan, 1978), 220 – 21. 39 Brigid stays in her monastery apart from occasional visits to the king. A sole reference to being “benighted in a spatious field in Meath” remains of her itineraries; Rochford, Life of S. Patricke . . . with the Holy Virgin S. Bridgit, 115. 40 See Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). 41 Rochford, Life of S. Patricke . . . with the Holy Virgin S. Bridgit, 116 – 18. 42 Alexandra Walsham, “Miracles and the Counter-Reformation Mission to England,” Historical Journal 46, no. 4 (2003): 779 – 815, at 801 – 2. 43 Appendix of the Saints, 200. 44 Hsia, World of Catholic Renewal, 155 – 56. 45 Robert Rochford, Life of S. Patricke . . . with the Holy Virgin S. Bridgit, 116; Appendix of the Saints, 208, 246. 46 See, for example, one Dublin Capuchin writing in the 1630s: Nicholas Archbold, “The Evangellical Fruict of the Seraphical Franciscan Order,” London, British Library, Harleian MS 3888, fols. 100r – 101r. 47 Rochford, Life of S. Patricke . . . with the Holy Virgin S. Bridgit, 116 – 17. 48 Appendix of the Saints, 184; Rochford, Life of S. Patricke . . . with the Holy Virgin S. Bridgit, 109, 111, 113 – 14. 49 Rochford, Life of S. Patricke . . . with the Holy Virgin S. Bridgit, 117 – 18, 113. 50 Appendix of the Saints, 189, 207. 51 Rochford, Life of S. Patricke . . . with the Holy Virgin S. Bridgit, 113. 52 Juicy references to Kildare following the Roman canon in Vita Prima had probably been deleted by Tynemouth for being irrelevant, but they would have been pearls to the Louvain friar. Where overt scriptural references have been deleted — for instance between the marriage of Cana and miraculous brewing of ale in Cogitosus — and where Rochford had access to both vitae, it is unclear whether Rochford favored the Nova Legenda or fought shy of conferring Christ-like authority on his Brigid. 53 Nova Legenda, fol. xlixr (fol. vr for Tynemouth’s Latin text); and for translations see Seán Connolly, “Vita Prima Sanctae Brigitae: Background and Historical Value,” Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 119 (1989): 5 – 49, at 31, 42. 54 Henry Fitzsimon, The Justification and Exposition of the Divine Sacrifice of the Mass (Douai, 1611), 95 – 96. 55 Even leading saints such as Teresa of Avila and Ignatius Loyola had found themselves

72 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 under suspicion. See Alastair Hamilton, Heresy and Mysticism in Sixteenth-Century Spain: The Alumbrados (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). 56 James Ussher, The Whole Works of . . . James Ussher, ed. C. E. Elrington and J. H. Todd, 17 vols. (Dublin, 1847 – 64), 4:314. 57 Rochford, Life of S. Patricke . . . with the Holy Virgin S. Bridgit, 132. 58 Two Histories of Ireland, The one written by Edmund Campion, the other by Meredith Hanmer Dr. of Divinity (Dublin, 1633), 45. 59 Ussher, Works, 4:280, 313 – 14; 6:450 – 51, 464 – 65; William O’Sullivan, “Correspon- dence of David Rothe and James Ussher, 1619 – 23,” Collectanea Hibernica 36–37 (1994 – 95): 7 – 49, at 18. 60 Rochford, Life of S. Patricke . . . with the Holy Virgin S. Bridgit, 137 – 38. 61 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, object number RP-P-OB-23.303. 62 Colgan, Triadis Thaumaturgae, 600; and see David Rothe’s Brigid Thaumaturga. 63 Jerome Porter, The Flowers of the Lives of the most renowned Saincts of the Three King- doms England Scotland, and Ireland (Douai, 1632), 124 – 25. 64 Porter, 119. 65 Porter, 124. Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1982), 81 – 82, describes a miraculous fire at Kildare that never goes out, is guarded by nineteen nuns, “which is circular and made of withies, and which no males may cross.” 66 Porter, Flowers of the Lives of the most renowned Saincts, 123 (my emphasis). 67 Ó Cléirigh, Martyrology of Donegal, 37. See also Colgan, Triadis Thaumaturgae, 653: “A Sancto Hibaro Episcopo coram synodo vocatur altera Maria; & hinc postea Maria Hibernorum appellata est” [St. Ibar called her “another Mary” at a synod and after that she was called Mary of the Irish]. 68 Rochford, Life of S. Patricke . . . with the Holy Virgin S. Bridgit, 139 – 40.

McCafferty / Brigid of Kildare 73

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/jmems/article-pdf/50/1/53/735141/0500053.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021