Den stora planen om Marias efterföljelse. Heliga Birgittas genuskorrigering

Abstract

Holy Bridgets (1303-73) Heavenly Visions, six hundred chapters divided into eight books and one appendix, "Extravagantes", published in 1492, contain remarkable sections transgressing the borders of ecdesiastic androcentrism. This artide analyses her work in the context of a tradition of women's visionary literature. Radical and unique though it is in comparison with that of other women visionaries, Bridgefs feminist strategy suffers from structural restrictions, since she worked for the church and thus operated within a patriarchal framework. However, her vision is profoundly feminist, based as it is on an enlarged definition of holiness and humanity that embraces female reproductive and sexual experiences. A chief metaphor is childbirth, which conveys both the giving of life and of death (in the purgatory visions). Since she uses these female metaphors and similes for men as well as for women, one can talk of a certain constructivist essentialism in Bridgefs vision. The connection between the heavenly and the earthly mother is established in a symmetric relationship between Mary and Bridget. Bridget is summoned by Mary in a second Annunciation, which bridges the ideal of Mary's pure womanhood and the less pure womanhood of ordinary women, represented by Bridget, mother of eight children. Apart from Bridgefs Mariocentric message, one finds in her work an ambivalent discourse of the body, a sexual grotesque, as Bakhtin would say. This can be interpreted as a feminist attempt at reclaiming the female body, a precedent of the current discussion of the female body as a symbolic construction.