St. Bridget and the Problem of Parenting

St. Bridget of Sweden (1303–1373) was an extremely popular medieval saint. Her visions and miracles enthralled medieval readers.

However, she was also a mother of eight children, but we hear relatively little about those children in traditional hagiographical lives of her. When we probe that silence, we find some interesting details which have the potential to speak to modern parents.

1. Married Life

St. Bridget, also known as Birgitta Birgersdotter, was born in the castle of Finsta, near Uppsala, in Sweden (in Northern Europe). Her parents were nobles who were distantly related to the Swedish royal family.

We know relatively little about her childhood, apart from the fact that her mother died when she was around the age of nine years old. When she was twelve her father arranged a marriage for her. Bridget had originally wanted to be a nun and she is reputed to have said, “better to die than be a bride.” But she was obedient to her father’s wishes, and so when she was thirteen she married Ulf (Olaf) Gudmarsson. He was a cousin of the king and also a prince of the Swedish region of Närke (Nericia), so Bridget found herself elevated to the heights of nobility.

After the wedding Bridget and Ulf lived on estates at Ulvåsa on Lake Boren in south-eastern Sweden (Östergötland). They lived a happily married life. Ulf had civil and legal responsibilities for administering the region and Bridget assisted him by providing secretarial support. She also taught him how to read and write.

She spent considerable time and effort on works of charity. She was known to be particularly keen to help those with no sources of income, such as impoverished elderly people and single mothers. She also provided dowries for poorer women who were otherwise unable to marry.

Bridget had a warm personality. She was described as “constantly smiling,” and as being “very straightforward and very gentle” (simplicissima et mansuetissima).

Unusually for the era, she never used any form of corporal punishment on her children, preferring to guide them by example and exhortation. She even took her children with her when she went to visit the poor. As the poor often lived in dirty and diseased situations, that led to criticisms from the wider nobility, which Bridget completely ignored.

2. At the Royal Court

In 1335 the Swedish King Magnus Eriksson (1316–1374) married Blanche of Namur (1320–1363). He immediately summoned his cousin Ulf to the royal court at Stockholm. This was because he wanted Bridget to become Blanche’s personal assistant, teaching her Swedish and helping her to navigate the politics of Swedish nobility.

Bridget performed the role for about four years, continuing at the same time to carry out acts of charity for the poor, and also regularly reading spiritual stories to the servants in the royal palace.

However, she did not enjoy living at court. She complained vigorously and repeatedly about the loose liaisons and poisonous politics which surrounded her. She was also disappointed in the characters of Magnus and Blanche, who craved luxury and frivolity, and who were too weak-minded to avoid unwise dependencies upon unreliable sycophants.

It is no surprise that Bridget found her situation increasingly wearing. As the years passed, she began to be even more forthright in her criticism of what transpired in the king and queen’s palace.

In 1339 Bridget and Ulf went on pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Olaf in Norway (Trondheim). The king and queen were pleased to grant their request to be absent from court. When they returned to court they quickly decided to go on another pilgrimage, this time to the shrine of St. James at Compostela. The king and queen were equally pleased to grant another request to be absent from court. Bridget and Ulf left Sweden in 1341, embarking upon a journey which was more than 2000 miles in each direction.

The journey took two years. Ulf fell seriously ill upon the way back. He rallied enough to get home, but his health was extremely precarious. It was so delicate that rather than go home to their family estates, Bridget took Ulf straight to the Cistercian Abbey at Alvastra. Her concerns were justified, as he died there a few months later, in early 1344.

As Ulf lay on his deathbed, Bridget attended to him constantly. Just before he died, he gave her his most treasured possession: his wedding ring. She treasured it for about a month, and then she seems to have come to an important spiritual realization. She could see that the first part of her life was now over, and so keeping the ring risked becoming a sentimental distraction from what lay ahead. She decided that the ring had to go, and although it pained her to do so, she threw it away.

3. The Mystic

Throughout her life St. Bridget had vivid religious experiences. At around the age of seven, she experienced an encounter with the Virgin Mary. Shortly afterwards, Christ told her that he was sad because too many people ignored his love for them. These experiences made a profound impact upon Bridget and they prompted her initial preference for religious life, rather than marriage.

When Bridget found herself a widow at the age of 41, she stayed living in the guest quarters at Alvastra Abbey for five years. She knew that the time had come for her to live her desire for religious life, and so she undertook intense fasting and penitential exercises to clarify God’s will for her.

Her visions took her in an unexpected direction. Rather than showing her which order to join, the visions told her to found a new religious order (which was later known as the Bridgettines). The order was to have some novel features, such as the idea that an abbess should be superior for the whole order. When the order finally got going in their first abbey, in 1384, some of the earliest monks seem to have really struggled with the countercultural idea that they genuinely did have to be obedient to a female superior.

However, when Bridget was staying at the Cistercian Abbey between 1344 and 1349, all the issues of founding a religious order lay far in the future. At that time, she renounced her civil responsibilities and focused her life around regular prayer.

She didn’t entirely cut herself off from the world. She still continued to regularly write to remind the king that his sins would lead him to eternal damnation, unless he repented immediately. He responded in 1346 by giving her royal estates to found her new religious order (Vadstena Abbey). After another round of warnings about his impending damnation, he bequeathed funds to her in 1347 to carry out building work for the abbey.

Bridget’s visions, published as “Celestial Revelations” were not just about spiritual matters. They also included commentaries on contemporary political issues. They include more than 700 separate visions, and they ran to eight volumes in early printed editions. They were so popular that they were quickly included in the earliest print runs, when printing presses were invented in Europe at the end of the fifteenth century.

Some critics were negative about Bridget’s visions, but the majority of readers found comfort and inspiration in her visions. A popular medieval devotion of fifteen daily prayers (for 365 days) was attributed to her, as a way of honoring the 5480 wounds which her visions informed her that Christ had received in the Passion.

In 1349 Bridget left Sweden for Rome. This was occasioned by two events. She needed papal approval for her new religious order, and she wanted to go on a pilgrimage to Rome for the Holy Year of 1350.

4. Life in Rome

St. Bridget’s journey to Rome must have been particularly arduous. She was travelling at the time that the Black Death was wreaking havoc across Europe, killing up to 50% of the population in some areas.

She arrived to a Rome which was in chaos. It was still suffering from the destructive consequences of a 1348 earthquake. And life in Rome was subject to the whims of competing noble families, such as the Colonna and Orsini who were regularly involved in gang fights in the streets. The civil disarray was partly due to the political vacuum caused by the Papacy relocating from Rome to Avignon, between 1309 and 1376.

Bridget lived in the Piazza Farnese, where there is now the Santa Brigida convent. In Rome she spent her time writing to beg the pope to return to Rome, and continuing to do the charitable works which she had done in Sweden. Once again, her priority seems to have revolved around supporting impoverished women. She regularly visited and supported sick and dying widows, as well as single mothers. And she gave dowries to enable poor women to contract marriages, so that they had an alternative to being forced into prostitution.

Bridget lived in Rome for twenty years, before Pope Urban V, in 1370, finally approved the Rule for the abbey which she was hoping to open. With permission for the abbey now secured, Bridget decided in 1371 to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

She was accompanied by her daughter and two sons on the pilgrimage. We know that there was also at least one bishop in her retinue, as he recorded the profound spiritual experiences which she had in Jerusalem. (See “St Birgitta of Sweden and the Pilgrimage to the Holy Land.”) She was now around 70 years of age and the long journey took a serious toll on her health. She arrived back in Rome in early 1373, tired and ill, and she died soon after on the 23rd of July.

To some extent Bridget died believing herself to be a failure. She had received permission for her abbey, but all of her other forays into politics had failed. She had tried to get the popes to return to Rome from Avignon, but that was not to finally occur until three years after her death. She had appealed to the kings of England and France to end the Hundred Years’ War, but that was to drift on until 1453. And she had tried to support and correct her King of Sweden, but he ended up being excommunicated and overthrown in a rebellion.

She had also experienced a number of difficulties with some of her children…

5. Bridget’s Children

Bridget married in 1316. She had eight children in the 28 years of her marriage, four sons and four daughters:

1. Märta Ulfsdotter (1319–71)
2. Gudmar Ulfsson (1322–33)
3. Karl Ulvsson till Ulvåsa (1327–72)
4. Ingeborg Ulfsdotter (1329–49)
5. St. Catherine of Sweden (1331–81)
6. Birger Ulfsson (1333–91)
7. Bengt Ulfsson (1335–46)
8. Cecilia Ulfsdotter (1337–99)

In traditional hagiography the focus on St. Bridget’s children usually jumps immediately to her fifth child, who is now known as St. Catherine of Sweden. The rest of Bridget’s family tend to obscurity in medieval lives of St. Bridget, unless specific incidents further attest to Bridget’s own holiness. (See Thomas Gascoigne’s The Life of St. Birgitta.)

However, when we look closely at St. Bridget’s children, a number of family dramas become apparent.

Her first child, Marta, wanted to marry someone whom Bridget denounced as a thief and swindler. Bridget tried to prevent Marta’s marriage, but Marta refused to listen to her. One of Marta’s daughters, Ingegerd (1356–1412), went on to become the first abbess of St. Bridget’s new religious order, but she was subsequently deposed for financial and moral irregularities.

Bridget’s youngest child, Cecilia, initially entered a convent. The next we hear of her is that her brother Karl forcibly broke her out of the convent. He then supported her in suing their mother in the royal courts, for a sufficiently large dowry to enable Cecilia to marry into the higher levels of nobility.

Perhaps the most challenging of all her children was her eldest son, Karl. He inherited the family’s titles and used the family wealth to live a lifestyle that Bridget did not approve of. He dabbled in various immoralities and was involved in armed conflicts that she was vehemently opposed to. At the very end of Bridget’s life, he accompanied her on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. But when they arrived in Naples he immediately embarked upon an adulterous and publicly scandalous affair with the queen, Joanna I (d. 1382). It only ended when he fell ill and unexpectedly died, albeit with a deathbed repentance which features prominently in medieval lives of St. Bridget.

Bridget’s children were no doubt at times a source of blessing and support to her. But some of their decisions and actions also clearly caused her considerable worries and difficulties.

6. St. Bridget’s Legacy

In 1391 Pope Boniface IX canonized Birgitta Birgersdotter (1303–1373) as the saint we now know as St. Bridget of Sweden. Due to the Papal Schism at that time, she was re-canonized in 1415 and again in 1419, as different papal claimants approved and re-approved of her.

The multiple canonizations attest to the fact that St. Bridget was an immensely popular saint. We can also see the scale of her popularity in the large number of surviving manuscripts of her book, the Revelations of St. Bridget of Sweden.

Much less well known, and scarcely appreciated, are the difficulties of parenting which St. Bridget had to navigate. We should not be surprised to hear that holy parents can beget less holy children. Scripture illustrates that point with examples such as good King Hezekiah and his son, Manasseh, who repeatedly “did what was evil in the Lord’s sight” (2 Kings 21:2).

But the point deserves emphasizing, especially in a modern world where parents can all too easily feel that they have failed when children lapse from religious practice, or act in other regrettable ways. If even saints like Bridget struggled to impart spiritual and moral direction to her children, modern parents should not rush to berate themselves as failures, when they too struggle.

When her children disappointed her, St. Bridget did not doubt or blame herself. She remained positive and committed her problems, in hope, to prayer. Perhaps this is a medieval parenting style, which still has relevance for modern parents?