Inspiration and Imagination: Visionary Authorship in the Early Manuscripts of the Revelations of Birgitta of Sweden

In a text omitted from the canonical collection of Birgitta of Sweden's revelations collected and disseminated in the 1370s as the Liber celestis revelationumj Christ explains to Birgitta the relationship between divine inspiration and the human authors of revealed texts by way of a homely metaphor: he likens himself to a carpenter who takes wood and makes a beautiful image from it but then hands it on to others so that they might make it more beautiful by adding their own colors to it. The metaphor here -- coloring the image carved by Christ the carpenter -- seems mainly to mean verbal adornment, perhaps by elaboration or gloss. Female saints were expected to embrace penance and an exaggerated degree of humility, not the outspokenness for which Birgitta was so well known, and certainly not expected to commit their words to writing. Her visions were full of images, outlandish descriptions of things she saw or heard. This itself might have led to suspicious that Birgitta was too much involved in their creation--that they were purely a product of her imagination. The first wave of Revelations manuscripts set the canon of Birgitta's texts and their program of illustrations shaped decisively the Birgittine iconography in later manuscripts and printed books. This essay argues that the most important illustrations in these manuscripts work, in a way that has not previously been understood, as visual extensions of arguments for Birgitta's authority made by Alfonso in the Epistola solitarii.