Sancta Birgitta

Birgitta Birgersdotter was born around 1303 into the highest Swedish nobility, married at thirteen, and bore eight children. She was a wife, a mother and a lady of the court for three decades before she was anything else — and the visions had been coming since she was a girl.

What she saw, from childhood, was the Passion: Christ crowned with thorns, bleeding from five wounds, speaking to her directly. She wrote it down and kept writing until it filled the eight books of the Revelationes. Widowed in 1344, she gave up her rank, founded her own order at Vadstena, and in 1350 went to Rome — where she stayed the rest of her life, nursing the poor with her own hands and telling popes and kings to their faces exactly where they had failed.

She never saw Sweden again. She died in Rome in 1373 and was canonised eighteen years later, which is close to immediate; her daughter Katarina carried her bones home to Vadstena. To the end she wore the crown her Bridgettines wear still — a band of white linen marked with five small red points, one for each wound. A noblewoman who spent fifty years looking steadily at one image, and made a continent look with her.