‘[V]ideo quasi duas bestias ferocissimas, quamlibet de genere suo. Altera enim cupidissima est deglutire que potest habere, et quo plus comedit … Bestia vero secunda nititur super omnes ascendere … In istis duabus bestiis intelliguntur duo reges, scilicet Francie et Anglie’ [I see, as it were, two most ferocious beasts, each of its own kind. The one beast is excessively greedy and will gobble up whatever it can get … The other beast strives to rise up above all others … these two beasts stand for the kingdoms of France and England].² With these words, the fourteenth-century visionary Bridget of Sweden defined the conflict between England and France that we know as the Hundred Years War. Translated from Swedish in to Latin and ultimately in to Middle English, her eventual resolution in her Revelations that England had the rightful claim in the dispute would help her texts rise to prominence and set the stage for the importance of her order in late medieval England, as this excerpt is translated and disseminated there well ahead of her full Revelations. The readership of texts by visionary women, especially Bridget and Catherine of Siena, may seem far removed from the warring kings and popes around them. However, the overlapping and interconnected Avignon Papacy (1309–77), the Hundred Years War (1337–1453), Papal Schism (1378–1417) and the women’s visions concerning these events, were all enmeshed in a way that we can see now and in a way that many medieval writers understood in the moment. By looking closely at some of their texts – Bridget’s Revelations, Stephen Maconi’s letter about Catherine’s visit to Avignon and both of their circulating vitae – I will examine how English readers and writers used the texts by and about these women to support, justify and clarify the English position during the Hundred Years War and as a way of cementing an English nationalism in opposition to the French, imagining England as a political and religious centre in Europe.

Interconnected conflicts: the Papal Schism within the Hundred Years War

From 1309 to 1376 the papacy had moved from Rome to Avignon, and throughout that time many worked to move it back. Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena were among the most visible and vocal of those encouraging the pope to return the papacy to what they saw as its rightful place in Rome. Bridget, the only woman to be canonised in the fourteenth century, founded a monastic order, influenced the politics of her time and authored 700 revelations that she herself wrote down in Swedish. These were translated into Latin and entitled the Liber Caelestis and ultimately compiled and disseminated by her confessor, Alfonso of Jaén, at the end of her life.³ Although she and Catherine never met, there is evidence that their confessors were in touch, and in death the women will be forever paired in temperament, achievement and text.⁴ After Bridget’s death, Catherine took up her cause in Avignon. Catherine, too, would influence the politics of her time through an astonishing epistolary output, as well as have her own book of revelations that she dictated in Siennese, Il Dialogo, translated and widely disseminated through the help of her hagiographer, Raymond of Capua, along with other followers. Her canonisation followed Bridget’s in the fifteenth century. Both women were engaged with the political and Church leaders of their time. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski notes that their areas of concern were far-reaching:

Both Bridget and Catherine saw returning the papacy to Rome as part of their Christian mission and worked during their lives to convince the pope to do so. Although Bridget died before she could see it happen, Catherine was instrumental in Gregory XI’s decision to return to Rome. She, along with Bridget, was also somewhat blamed for the Papal Schism that followed Gregory XI’s death with the election of a pope in Rome in 1378 (Urban VI), an election of a rival pope five months later by dissenting cardinals (Clement VII) who then moved back to Avignon, and – eventually in 1410 – the election of the “antipope” John XXIII in Pisa.⁶ Each pope had with him a coterie of loyal cardinals and had essentially divided Europe into various factions of supporters. As Philip Stump writes, ‘The roughly equal portions of Europe which supported each of the rival papacies hardened into de facto separate churches, which were called “obediences” and whose tenacity was responsible for prolonging and intensifying the schism’.⁷ That France mostly sided with the Avignon pope should be no surprise, especially because Clement VII was a relative of king Charles V of France. England’s loyalties lay with Rome largely because its opponent France clearly supported Avignon, even though it led to some reconfiguring of monastic houses that had their supervisors in French houses.⁸

So how entwined were the war and the Schism? By taking a side in either the Schism or the war, a side was implicitly taken – even necessitated – in the other crisis. The historian Christopher Allmand notes that ‘it is open to debate whether the Hundred Years War helped to prolong the Schism within the Church, but that the Schism hardened the attitudes of the French and English nations to each other is undoubted’.⁹ As both conflicts involved neighbouring countries and various political alliances, their interrelated concerns tentacled out far beyond the French and English borders. As Blumenfeld-Kosinski writes concerning the Schism, ‘in almost all cases the adherence to one or the other pope was bound up with already existing or developing political conflicts. Thus, the French and English attitudes toward the divided papacy, as well as their repeated efforts at union, cannot be separated from the vagaries of the Hundred Years War.’¹⁰ The Hundred Years War had already forced some alliances among the neighbours of England and France as both sides sort to create robust coalitions of support, but, as Simon Egan has noted, ‘the papal schism of the later fourteenth century further entrenches preexisting alliance blocs that had developed across Europe during the Hundred Years’ War’.¹¹ He explains that the English, Flemish, Danes, Swedes, Northern Italians, Poles and Hungarians were behind Urban VI, the Roman Pope. Clement VII in Avignon, however, had the support of the French, Castilians, Aragonese, Neopolitans, Cypriots and Scots.

Many contemporaries knew very well that the events of the Hundred Years War and the Schism were intertwined. The English king Richard II recognised that there could be no resolution to the Schism without England and France in agreement, and their opposite sides in the war naturally fell to the same in the Schism. The Benedictine monk and prior Honoré Bovet, deeply involved in the politics of the Schism as legate and diplomat, was also concerned with the relations between the French and the English and the trouble that the war wrought. His 1389 L’Arbre des batailles answered a series of questions concerning the legal and ethical obligations of a king and its people, with several of these directed at Anglo-French relations, working through various scenarios, for example, where English students or families of such students in Paris were subject to arrest because of their nationality.¹² However, even though much of the treatise took up the fallout of the Hundred Years War, he was clear from the outset that he was most concerned about the Schism: ‘la guerre de l’Eglise et de la foy si est assés plus perilleusse et plus griefvaible guerre que n’est celle dez roys ne dez princes ne dez autres seingneurs terriens’ [the war of the Church and of the Faith is more perilous and more grievous than wars of kings or princes or other earthly lords].¹³ Bovet’s expertise in the papacy and his determination to end the Schism made him an important envoy, ‘entrusted with defending the Clementist position before an English delegation led by John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster’, according to historian Michael Hanley.¹⁴ Bovet would take this argument up later in a dream vision entitled Somnium super materia scismatis, where he recounted a conversation with John of Gaunt at Amiens in 1392; the duke says, ‘quando inter reges pax esset, statim haberemus etiam unicum papam, ante non’ [when peace came among kings, we would have a single pope immediately, not before].¹⁵ John of Gaunt similarly told an Avignon papal legate, according to the Chronicles of Charles VI, that the Schism would have to end when the war did.¹⁶ Richard’s marriage to the French princess Isabella in 1396 was intended not only to end the war by uniting the crowns of England and France, but also to bring about an end to the Schism. A resolution to both conflicts may have come earlier had Richard II not been deposed, but according to Blumenfeld-Kosinski, his deposition and death ‘ruined any chances at a joint action to try and end [it]’.¹⁷ The war was revitalised under Henry IV (1367–1413) and extended under Henry V (1389–1422), deepening the divide of the Schism. With this renewed wedge driven between France and England, the texts associated with the visionary women and their push for Rome, even though they were originally concerned with the Avignon Papacy, take on new meaning and seeming urgency.

Later, after the Schism had been resolved but the Hundred Years War raged on, the prominent French theologian Jean Gerson would write about the visionary Joan of Arc that ‘by certain signs the heavenly King of all chose her as standard-bearer, in order to frighten the enemies of justice and raise up [its] friends, so that the strong arms of iniquity would be confounded by the hand of a young girl and virgin’.¹⁸ Not much earlier (1423), in his De examinatione doctrinarum, Gerson wrote about how the Schism would never have happened if Gregory XI had not been swayed by what were likely the false visions of women who had convinced him to move the papacy – here, although he does not name them explicitly, Gerson strongly implied the culpability of the two visionaries Bridget and Catherine. Bridget’s support of England in the war certainly did not help endear her to Gerson, and, as Claire L. Sahlin notes, the views ‘must have tipped the scales against her even further’.¹⁹ Gerson did not seem aware of his contradictory scepticism about women visionaries and praise for Joan, and modern scholars have condemned and defended Gerson’s writings on either side, trying to make sense of these disparate opinions about female visionaries and their political activities.²⁰ What Gerson’s views show us clearly, however, is the way in which the Hundred Years War, the Schism and women’s visions were related in the mind of at least one important medieval scholar and politician. Political affiliations, papal relations and national ties all helped to define medieval readers’ understanding and dissemination of women’s visionary writings.

While Bridget’s Revelations included a vision specifically about the Hundred Years War, Catherine’s did not, with her political concerns focused on the Avignon Papacy and her fervent belief that the Pope belonged in Rome. After Catherine’s death, and with the papacy split during the Schism, both visionaries’ earlier texts about the necessity of returning the papacy to Rome when in Avignon have different meanings in light of the turmoil that followed with rival popes. The antipathy towards France that the texts espoused allow the readers to see the visionaries as pro-England just as they were pro-Rome. Because the political entanglements of the Schism were so closely tied to that of the Hundred Years War, the resolution of the former simply permitted some of those same conflicts to be carried out in the latter. In later fifteenth-century redactions of their texts in England, with the crisis of the Schism over, the visionaries’ alignment with Rome and against Avignon took on new meaning.

The Council of Constance (1414–18) brought the war, the Schism and the texts of the visionary women together in one place and time. The Council was assembled with the encouragement of King Sigismund of Bohemia, then the emperor-elect of the Holy Roman Empire, in the hopes of resolving the Schism, which it effectively did in 1417 with the resignation of two of the popes (Gregory XII in Rome and John XXIII in Pisa), the excommunication of the third (Benedict XIII in Avignon) and the election of Pope Martin V (who remained pope until 1431).²¹ It was clear to many of the participants that the Schism could not end easily with France and England at war. For example, the Welsh chronicler Adam Usk wrote in his Chronicle of 1414 that Sigismund travelled through France and England hoping for peace between the two nations while the Council deliberated; however, he is thwarted in this process: ‘Sismundus, rex Hongarie et Romanorum, postquam per annum pro unione ecclesie in concilio generali Constancie laborasset, … per regnum Francie in Angliam pro regnorum pacis reformacione [transiit]. Sed cum ad magnas regni expensas London stetisset, Francorum uersucia negocio frustrato, ad concilium rediit Constancie’ [Sigismund … having spent a year at the general council of Constance striving for the unity of the church … came via the kingdom of France to England, in the hope of establishing peace between the realms. After he had spent some time in London at great expense to the kingdom, however, the negotiations came to nothing because of the duplicity of the French, so he returned to the council at Constance].²² The council was explicit about its aim to end the Schism, but also had an unstated purpose to end the Hundred Years War, and the war certainly loomed over the council with the English victory of Agincourt happening in 1415.²³ As historian Phillip H. Stump speculates, ‘the renewal of the Hundred Years’ War during the meeting of the Council did certainly cause tensions between the representatives there from the kingdom of England and the kingdom of France, but if anything, these had been more inflamed before Sigismund’s return to the Council’.²⁴ Everyone involved could not see an end to one crisis without somehow working towards the end of the other.

The Council had the additional aim of assessing and evaluating heresies. While it is well known for its condemnation of the English Wycliffism and the execution of Jan Hus and the Hussite leader Jerome of Prague, the Council also approached the question of the validity of women’s visions, specifically Bridget’s. One of the main conveners and leaders of the Council was Jean Gerson. Gerson was convinced that at least these women visionaries, who had laboured to move Gregory XI from Avignon to Rome, were charlatans and responsible for the Schism. He wrote as much in his De examinatione doctrinarum, indicating both Catherine and Bridget, noting that ‘Quia levius sedeuctibiles, quia petinacius seductrices, quia non constat eas esse sapientiae divinae cognitrices’ [women are too easily seduced; because they are too obstinately seducers; because it is not fitting that they should be knowers of divine wisdom].²⁵ Although he does not specifically accuse them of heresy, his writings were used against them and other women visionaries throughout the later Middle Ages. Deborah Fraioli describes what factors would be prompting Gerson in his disapproval of Bridget: ‘Gerson would instinctively have had political objections to Bridget. She articulated overtly anti-French revelations, campaigned against the Avignon papacy, and … tried to intervene globally with popes, kings, and emperors, rather than locally.’²⁶ The disruption of the Church was what allowed the mystical and visionary woman to thrive and be heard, but they were also speaking to that disruption. Indeed, Dyan Elliot suggests you cannot separate the phenomenon of women visionaries in the later Middle Ages from the major political and social upheavals which allowed their actions: ‘Gerson was responding to the emergence of a cadre of prominent female mystics of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries who had begun to play an unprecedented role in public life. The triune disasters of the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, and the papal schism created a vacuum in institutional authority into which female mystics and prophets had moved.’²⁷

Despite Gerson’s animosity towards Bridget, for many at Constance, it was important that she was not condemned as a heretic. Her visions were already being deployed to political ends and she had already been canonised. As Blumenfeld-Kosinski writes, ‘the advocates of the pope’s return to Rome used revelations as the preferred means of communicating with various popes. Revelations are inspired speech, a privileged discourse that allows ordinary people to gain extraordinary authority when addressing the prelates and secular rulers of their time.’²⁸ The visions of both Bridget and Catherine of Siena were important weapons for those desiring to return and then keep the Church in Rome, and likewise were concerning for those on the side of Avignon for the power they granted the opposition. Despite Bridget’s thorough investigation for heresy and questions surrounding her legitimacy, she was still a focus of Gerson’s ire and the Council’s inquiry.

England was also under pressure to uphold Bridget’s authority. Not only because of the importance of her visions, but because ultimately England chose Bridget as a symbol of its orthodoxy and as a counter to the Wycliffite heresies which were also a focus of the Council. Vincent Gillespie argues, ‘Konstanz was an important shop window for the English church, which felt itself under pressure in the European environment because of the pestiferous, pernicious, and annoyingly persistent heresies of John Wyclif, whose teaching occupied much of the Council’s time in its early months and was definitively condemned in its eighth session in May 1415’.²⁹ England thus made a determined stand against Wyclif at the Council and afterward. As part of this stand, Henry V established the Bridgettine foundation of Syon Abbey and the Carthusian House of Sheen, all to demonstrate the new orthodoxy of the English Church and a break with the past. Despite Gerson’s condemnation, Bridget was claimed in many ways as a kind of English saint and her visions were used to serve the national interest. Tekla Bude has shown how the Marian devotion at Syon Abbey, in particular, dovetails with the English investment in a matrilineal claim to the throne, further underscoring the importance of Bridget’s Revelations to England and to Henry V.³⁰

Although many of the texts I look at here circulated in Latin, I am focusing on vernacular English texts for two reasons: one, the audience and provenance of these texts are from the same class and group that are fighting in the Hundred Years War;³¹ and two, as historian David Green notes, ‘the use of the vernacular for political purposes and the clearer identification of national allegiance with language gathered pace over the course of [it]’.³² The very vernacularity and subject matter of these texts, then, are subtly a political statement and stance on the war. These texts – like the women in them – are not simply a product of the sentiments inspired by the war but producers of them.

Reading Bridget of Sweden in medieval England

Bridget well understood that her visions had important political implications and made sure that the people who had the authority to act on them knew what they were. She repeatedly petitioned Clement VI in Avignon to make peace between the warring England and France, which failed at each attempt likely because Clement was clearly on the side of the French in the disputes.³³ For example, as Sahlin writes:

Bridget knew that her revelations were going to be unpopular among members of that audience but hoped they would lead to a peaceful resolution for both intertwined conflicts. She was, however, unsuccessful in this resolution in her lifetime, but the far reach of her Revelations and its use for political ends demonstrate how, as Pavlína Rychterová argues, Bridget and her visions were important tools for those in power to make their arguments.³⁵

Bridget’s prominence in England can, to a large extent, be understood as a result of her perceived role in precipitating the Schism by calling for the papacy to return to Rome, as well as her visions concerning the Hundred Years War. The Schism ushered in what Blumenfeld-Kosinski calls ‘an unprecedented visionary activity, a phenomenon one could call mystical activism’, resulting in a proliferation of mystical texts by women and giving the readers of those texts plenty of material in which to read political implications.³⁶ More authority was granted to the visionary women than they had in the past, and Bridget and Catherine’s earlier revelations took on new meanings. Even some of the visions that were not overtly political were understood to be so. For example, many of Bridget’s visions concerning the pope, such as one where she saw him as paralysed, are not understood literally by her audience but read in light of their metaphoric meaning about the papacy and its rightful place. Bridget’s politics were likely influenced by Sweden’s, and her attitude toward England is no exception. As Bridget Morris explains:

It is with this new authority that Bridget in many ways became an English saint, also largely due to the prominence of her order through the establishment of Syon Abbey. The nuns and priests at Syon retained a close link to the monarchy and became a defining order of the English Church from its beginnings under Henry V through to the dissolution of the monasteries (where Syon plays an important role in fighting the changes of the Reformation).

One of the primary reasons this Swedish saint became so important in England, however, lay with her early revelation about the English claim over the French crown, the central conflict of the Hundred Years War. These parts of her Revelations, all from Chapter IV, were excerpted and circulated separately, translated into Middle English and clearly retained a power, as we see the vision recur in other literature and poetry. Bridget Morris describes their substance:

It is the fact that Edward had the most just cause, however, which retained the most purchase in medieval England. While the rest of the revelation (the suggestion of marriage between England and France, for example) was repeated and excerpted, the fact that Bridget names Edward as the rightful victor in the conflict is the part that is most often referenced.

In the most direct vision about the war, the Virgin Mary speaks to Bridget, metaphorically setting up the kingdom of England and France as a battle between two greedy beasts, although one of them has the ‘just cause’ while one does not. The beasts had no compunction about spilling blood and fighting for causes that they knew were unjust, blinded as they are by greed and pride. Here neither king is praised, but one king is still identified as having more of a right to victory:

This Middle English translation is from London, British Library Cotton MS Claudius B I, one of only two extant manuscripts with the complete texts of Bridget’s Liber Celestis in Middle English.⁴⁰ Bridget’s life and revelations are found in Latin and Middle English in many extant fifteenth-century texts and a sixteenth-century printed volume. Syon Abbey’s prominence as a spiritual centre, especially one linked to devotional literature, kept Bridget constantly in the public imagination.

Later in the same chapter, Bridget again invoked the Hundred Years War and the problems it was causing in France, England and throughout Europe. In Revelation IV, Chapter 105, Christ speaks to Bridget and argues ‘by what mene he will þat pes be made bytwene þe kynges of Frauns and Ingland: to þe whilke ife þe kynges will not assent, þai sall be full greuously ponyshed’.⁴¹ Christ begins the revelation by telling Bridget that he is actually peace, and that until the warring parties decide that they openly and truly embrace Christ, they cannot expect a peaceful resolution. As a large part of the rhetoric of war is that ‘God is on our side’, this serves as a rebuke to both kings. But, ultimately, Christ (through Bridget) brings up the question of legitimacy and suggests a solution: ‘þerefor, for one of þo kynges hase ryght, it pleses me þat pes be made be mariage, and so þat þe realme may come to þe lawfull aire’.⁴² Bridget almost reluctantly agrees that Edward III (1312–77) had the legal claim but indicates that both Edward and Philip are morally culpable and neither was acting in good Christian faith.

Bridget’s revelation about the war closes with a prophecy that if Edward does not ‘obey’, the king would not prosper and would ‘ende his life in sorow, and þe realm sall be lefte in tribull and tribulacion’.⁴³ She outlined that the three things that need to be obeyed are a marriage that ensures a legitimate successor for both countries, an intent to spread Christianity, and the removal of ‘intollerabill taxis and takyng of þer sogettes gudes and fraudulent adinuencions, and þat þai lufe bettir þe saules of þame’.⁴⁴ Even here, we can see how Bridget’s understanding of the war and its repercussions were far beyond the two nations involved and that they were representing larger and wider issues throughout Christendom. She noted that if the king ‘þe whilke hase riȝt will obei, I sall help him and feght for him’; but if he did not listen to the prophecy and heed the warnings, ‘he sall not come to his purpose, bot a ioyfull bygynnyng sall haue a sorrowfull endyng’.⁴⁵ So, although her revelation did indicate legitimacy for England, it did not prophesy a hopeful ending without significant change.

Although the revelation was hardly complimentary, it was firm in stating that England’s claim is legitimate – despite the greed, pride and anger that are human complications in the matter. This revelation may very well be the first text about Bridget that made its way to England. It took place in 1348, making them among Bridget’s earliest visions. As noted earlier, Bridget’s outreach to the pope and both kings on this matter show how politically connected she was and her real interest in making a difference in the political climate of the time. Bridget Morris notes, ‘Birgetta’s intervention in these events, though it fell on deaf ears, is an example of her close interest in dynastic power politics well beyond the boundaries of Sweden. Birgitta’s, and the Swedish monarchy’s qualified support for the English may have been promoted by Queen Blanka’s family associations with England.’⁴⁶ Soon after Bridget made the revelation known, it ‘was forwarded in a letter by Sweden’s King Magnus to King Edward III of England and King Philip IV of France, directing them to establish peace between their nations’.⁴⁷ The letter survives in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 404, a manuscript of collected prophecies compiled by Henry of Kirkstead OSB (c.1314–78), the prior of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds.

The revelation’s reappearance in that of fifteenth-century poet Thomas Hoccleve’s overtly political poem, Regiment of Princes, demonstrates how the prophecy is recycled as the war and its conflicts drag on. Dating from around 1410–11, the poem was written at a time when, as its editor Charles Blyth notes, England still felt the repercussions of Richard II’s deposition; it partly reinforced the legitimacy of the Lancastrian line and of the future Henry V as heir to the throne.⁴⁸ But that the English were surrounded by other anxieties, namely the overlapping concerns of both the Hundred Years War and the Schism, again come to the fore. Hoccleve addressed the war directly in the poem by invoking Bridget’s revelation regarding the resolution of the war, endorsing England’s claims. Hoccleve writes,

Hoccleve invoked Bridget’s revelation that there would not be peace between the kings until matrimony mended the division. But he goes on to say that this would settle the division, for that ‘o kyng hath right’, meaning the English king, is on the correct side of the conflict. Tekla Bude has argued that this passage spoke directly to Henry V as pressing his political will and making peace through matrimonial alliance with France – even though the original prophecy does not speak to him. She notes, ‘Hoccleve’s Bridgettine exemplar supplants the retrospective template of the Fürstenspiegel with political prophecy: “avantage” – quite literally the profit to be gained in looking ahead – is presented as open and obvious, because the Regiment pre-interprets Bridget’s Revelations for the young prince. Their dictates apply to Henry, who must claim his French territory and his French bride in order to be a good, peaceful, and prosperous ruler.’⁵⁰ Bridget’s revelation in the poem shows two important things: one, that Bridget herself was taken seriously and that her intervention in the English political realm was welcome and important to its readers; and two, that prior to the more famous woman of the Hundred Years War, Joan of Arc, visionary women and their prophecies were already shaping the trajectory of the war and people’s opinions about it.

Joan of Arc’s eventual role in the Siege of Orléans in 1429 galvanised the French against the English, and her capture and eventual death did the same for the English. Her visions were of a victorious France, which she reiterated during her trial where she claimed ‘Anglici dimmittent majus vadium quam fecerint coram Aurelianis et quod totum perdent in Francia. Didit etiam quod præfati Anglici habebunt majorem peritionem quam unquam habuerunt in Francia, et hoc erit per magnam victoriam quam Deus mittet Gallicis’ [the English will lose a greater stake than they did at Orléans, and all they have in France. Further, the English will suffer a greater loss than they ever had in France, through a great victory that God will give the French].⁵¹ Christine de Pizan’s ‘Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc’ crystallised how she captured the French imagination as chosen by God to restore the king and guide the country. Christine portrayed her defence of France not only as signalling the wholesale destruction of the English enemy but as a defence of faith itself:

The ferocity of the English and Anglo-Burgundian opposition to Joan’s revelations and actions (and her effect on her French countrymen) was attested to in the violence of her death, guilty of witchcraft and heresy, when she was burned at the stake in 1431.

Hoccleve’s reference to Bridget’s prophecy demonstrates that England, earlier, had its own visionary woman on its side in Bridget of Sweden, whose Revelations also address the war and its legitimacy. As noted earlier, Bridget addresses the war and England’s role in it more than once in the course of her Revelations, and manuscripts containing these excerpts circulated independently of the Revelations because of their subject matter and favourable outlook for the nation.⁵³ The question of the legitimacy of the English claim to the French throne (and vice versa) at the centre of the vision dovetailed with the uncertainty about Bridget’s own truthfulness as a religious authority. If Joan’s vision of a victorious France were legitimate, then the English claim to the throne was not. If Bridget’s revelations were true, then the claim was sanctioned. Some tried to reconcile the two by selectively excerpting Bridget’s prophecies and using them to support Joan. As Frailoli explains, Bridget’s prophecy that only a moral and sinless kingdom can win the war was used to give ‘concrete and immediate expression to the idea that French sin and French kingship were causally connected, a judgment of special significance because it looks inwardly to moral reform as a way of controlling the outside forces of war … the emphasis on correcting personal behavior may also have seemed to forecast Joan’s own special insistence on moral reform’.⁵⁴ This brings us back to Gerson, who appeared to dismiss all such visions in his De probatione spirituum (On the Proving of Spirits), in which, point by point, he tried to refute the defence of Bridget’s revelations that had been written by her confessor, Alphonse of Pecha. When his attempt to discredit Bridget’s revelations had failed at the Council of Constance, and her canonisation was reaffirmed, he worked to make sure that women’s visions were in general treated with suspicion. At the Council, England and France were on opposite sides arguing about Bridget’s sanctity. For Gerson, the problem was rooted in the notion that there was no clerical control of these unmediated visions, and he argued firmly that it was the role of a theologian to discern whether the visions were doctrinally sound. Gerson later argued for Joan of Arc’s visions, immediately after the English defeat, writing in his tract on her, Super Facto Puellae et Credulitate Sibi Præstanda, ‘concludendum est tandem ex praemissis quod pie et salubriter potest de pietate fidei et devotionis sustineri factum illius puellae, circumstantiis attentis, cum effectu patenti, praesertim ex causa finali quae iustissima est, scilicet restitutio regis ad regnum suum et pertinacissimorum inimicorum iustissima est, scilicet repulsio seu debellatio’ [it should be concluded … that the feat of this maid can piously and wholesomely be supported in terms of piety of faith and devotion, taking into account the circumstances and the evident outcome. This is especially so because of the final cause, which is most just: that is, the restoration of the king to his kingdom and the most just expulsion or vanquishing of most tenacious enemies].⁵⁵ Gerson did not see Joan lead the monarchy to victory, as he had hoped. He was exiled from the city and University of Paris once it was under Anglo-Burgundian control.⁵⁶

Bridget’s revelation that peace could be achieved through marriage did not work out, although there ensued several attempts at making marriage the solution. Richard II, who had always appeared to be more interested in peace than war with France, married the French princess Isabella – one of Charles VI’s daughters. The peace was shattered when Richard was deposed by Henry IV and Isabella was promptly sent back to France without the significant dowry she had brought with her. Henry V would subsequently marry Catherine, Isabella’s sister, as part of the 1420 Treaty of Troyes. These marriages were often the covenant through which peace was forged, or part of other negotiations, but they did symbolically unite the houses and give some more weight to at least suspending the hostilities between the countries. However, in the case of Henry V and the French–English marriage of Henry VI, these attempts fell flat. With Henry V’s early death, his infant son Henry VI was the king who actually received the crown in France. However, his reign was plagued by the French attempt to reclaim what they saw as stolen from them. Henry VI’s marriage to Margaret of Anjou was also negotiated as part of a truce in 1444 in the Treaty of Tours. As Watson explains, the treaty’s dissolution led to the end of the war but also the start of the Wars of the Roses because of Margaret’s French ties: ‘The treaty did not hold for long, and the French soon brought the Hundred Years War to an end by reclaiming al the English lands in northern France. The disaster precipitated the Wars of the Roses, which pitted Henry, Margaret, and their Lancastrian partisans against Richard, Duke of York, and his allies. Yorkist propaganda accused Margaret of betraying the English to the French.’⁵⁷

While marriage was not the solution that these kings had hoped, each also recognised how the Church and the Hundred Years War were connected, whether during or after the Schism. In some cases, it was hard to keep these two causes distinct. For example, the Despenser’s Crusade of 1383 was fought under the guise of aiding the citizens of Ghent against papal supporters in Avignon but was really just another front in the Hundred Years War. Henry V positioned himself as a warrior against heresies, a defender of the faith. In this way, he framed the war against France as a holy war, linking it to the Schism and the false pope installed in Avignon. While fighting his wars overseas, Henry V was also battling the Wycliffites and other heresies at home, tying his military battles to ecclesiastical ones so that the people could not separate the two. He used religion as a weapon and a banner. For example, historian David Green notes that before the Battle of Harfleur, he had a herald read passages from Deuteronomy, encouraging the town to capitulate if it wanted mercy.⁵⁸ And Jeremy Catto points out that upon his return to England after the victory at Agincourt, Henry deliberately showed it as a religious victory: ‘The city of London furnished him with a joyous entry after Agincourt in which a heavenly host of angels, prophets, and apostles cheered him in, a consciously sober figure in purple, the colour of the Passion, on his way to offer at the London shrines: a scene which made a deep and long-remembered impression and which was repeated in 1421 on the arrival of Queen Catherine.’⁵⁹ The war, the offerings and the shrines are entangled. Bridget’s by then well-known revelation about the English claim to the French throne certainly helped prompt Henry V’s decision to fund the Bridgettine house of Syon Abbey in 1415, the same year as the victory at Agincourt. Henry’s younger sister had married Eric XIII of Sweden in 1406, further cementing an alliance between the two countries and Henry V’s affiliation for the Swedish saint (who had died in 1373).

When Henry VI married Margaret of Anjou, a book that she was given as a wedding gift had an elaborate genealogy that reinforced his claim to the English and French throne, highlighting the purpose of the marriage but also serving as a public propaganda about the union. One of the first items in this codex, now known as the Talbot Shrewsbury Book, is a genealogical diagram in the shape of a fleur-de-lis that traces Henry VI’s line from St Louis. The book also includes within it other texts relevant to the Hundred Years War, including works by Christine de Pizan and Honoré Bovet.⁶⁰ However, this gift showed that even as the French and English lines united in marriage (repeatedly), that relationship is at its core troubled and the question of legitimacy still loomed large. The book was gifted by John Talbot, whom Nancy Bradley Warren notes would ‘have had an especially personal knowledge of – and likely a particular animosity toward – Joan of Arc. He was one of the chief commanders at the Battle of Patay, where he was captured when the French army, inspired by Joan, crushed the English forces’.⁶¹ For Talbot, a book that clearly reinforced England’s claim over France would be both a personal and political gift.

In the larger scheme of Bridget’s Revelations, her vision about the war was minor compared to her sustained campaign to move the popes back to Rome. Bridget herself moved permanently to Rome in 1349, making it her life’s work to convince the Church hierarchy of the rightful place of the papacy.

English readers and Catherine of Siena

Catherine of Siena picked up where Bridget had left off in trying to convince Gregory XI that now was the time to move back to Rome, although she relied less on her visionary powers and more on the political powers of persuasion through her letters and other advocacy. A number of coincidental events worked in her favour, all used as evidence of God’s displeasure with the corruption of the Avignon court – the Black Death had decimated much of Europe, the Crusades had stalled after the 1291 events at Acre (which had moved the last city held by crusaders in the Middle East back into Muslim hands) and in Italy there had been a revolt against the French-held papal states, known as the ‘War of the Eight Saints’ from 1375 to 1378. The stalling of the Crusades, specifically, was directly linked to the Hundred Years War because many of the likely crusaders (and the money to fund them) were tied up in England’s and France’s battles with one another.⁶² Catherine herself was extremely interested in the Crusades and was frequently trying to drum up support, fighters and money to that effect. One of her letters to Gregory XI demonstrated her dual concern of moving the Avignon Papacy and reinvigorating the Crusades.

She told him that he had power given by God and that he should ‘mandate inanzi e compite, con vera e santa sollicitudine, quello che per santo proponimento avetecominciato, de l’avvenimento vostro e del santo e dolce passaggio, e non tardate più, ché per lo tardaresono avenuti molti inconvenienti e ‘l dimonio s’è levato e leva per impedire che questo non si faccia,perché s’avede del danno suo’ [pursue and finish with true holy zeal what you have begun by holy intent – I mean your return [to Rome] and the sweet holy crusade. Delay no longer, for your delaying has already been the cause of a lot of trouble. The devil has done and is doing his best to keep this from happening, because he sees that he will be the loser].⁶³ Here, although not explicitly invoking a vision, Catherine was leaning on the power of the visionary reputation, hinting she understood the stakes for the pope’s soul and the importance of using his power in service of Rome. Catherine also wrote to John Hawkwood, an English mercenary whose training in the Hundred Years War made him a valuable sword-for-hire in Italy’s internal battles, and someone whom Richard II used for various diplomatic missions at the same time. Records show, for example, that Geoffrey Chaucer in his capacity as court officer went to Italy and met with Hawkwood at least once.⁶⁴ Chaucer’s mission was to gain Hawkwood’s support in the Hundred Years War, according to Marion Turner, as well as to negotiate ‘a marriage alliance between Bernabò [Visconti]’s daughter, Caterina and Richard II’.⁶⁵ With Hawkwood, Catherine’s interest lay in redirecting his military abilities towards the Crusades, showing how astute she was in recognising where military power was being distributed and the ways in which she felt it should be used in to order to support the Church.

The English interest in Catherine may have been enhanced by the fact that she was so linked to, and understood as influential in, moving the Avignon Papacy to Rome. As we have noted, the religious division caused by the Schism mapped onto the military alliances of the Hundred Years War. To be against Avignon was to be against France; to be for Rome was to support England. While there are several different Middle English texts concerning Catherine – her vita and her Dialogo, for example – one of the texts that had independent circulation explicitly concerns Avignon.⁶⁶ It survives in a Middle English translation in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 114, a letter that Stephen Maconi, a follower of Catherine’s, wrote for an inquest known as the Processo Castellano in support of her canonisation after her death. Stephen’s letter mostly consisted of a recollection that Catherine and her followers carried to Avignon in order to meet with the pope.

Stephen’s letter was originally written in the face of opposition to veneration of Catherine as a saint before her (contested) canonisation. Like Bridget, Catherine’s role in the Schism had made her a polarising figure in the Church. The bishop of Castello held the inquiry, Il Processo Castellano, and Stephen’s letter (dated 1411, the same year as Hoccleve’s Regiment) was an entry into the corpus of documents amassed there – all of which were working to make Catherine become St Catherine. George Ferzoco writes that ‘a primary concern of Catherine’s promoters may have been that someone might attack her teaching, especially regarding two fraught issues: the legitimacy of the pope and his rightful place in Rome; and the holy woman’s ecstasies’.⁶⁷ These issues are still relevant in mid-fifteenth-century England, but here the legitimacy of the pope was tied to the Schism (not the Avignon Papacy), and the right side of the Schism (Rome) was also tied to the Hundred Years War. Likewise, the legitimacy of holy women’s visions linked both – are Bridget’s and Catherine’s visions correct? Are Joan of Arc’s?

The Middle English translation that survived in MS Douce 114 was nearly contemporary with Catherine’s actual canonisation, at least fifty years after Stephen wrote the letter, but its somewhat defensive tone would have worked to authorise Catherine as a visionary on the right side of history. The movement of the letter from Italy to England, from Latin to vernacular, also signalled a movement from clergy to laity. Although the actual manuscript of MS Douce 114 seems to have remained in monastic hands as its provenance is from the Carthusian charterhouse of Beauvale in Nottinghamshire, the translator included ‘A shorte Apologetik’ where he apologised for the weakness of the translation. Here, it is clear that he imagined the reach of his translation beyond the cloister:

The letter remains odd in the corpus of Catherine texts in medieval England, and texts about women saints and visionaries generally. Rather than dwelling on her miraculous or prophetic abilities (although Stephen does gesture toward this in some of the stories he tells about Catherine), the main frame of the letter and its narrative is about a trip that Catherine and her group of followers, her famiglia, took to Avignon. Part of its appeal to readers would have been tied to Catherine’s championship of Rome, so evident in this text, as well as Stephen’s insistence on Gregory XI and his advisers’ trust in Catherine – something that will later be placed under doubt by Jean Gerson and other detractors after the Schism.

Stephen’s letter was careful to authenticate Catherine’s comprehension and understanding of Holy Writ and emphasised the faith that Pope Gregory XI had in Catherine. He also, notably, remarks that Urban VI, too, had great faith in Catherine and her authority. As Urban VI’s election to pope in Rome also marks the beginning of the Schism, Stephen was clearly making a statement as to where he stood on the conflict, a stance with which his audience would also agree:

Stephen explained the appreciation of these successive (Roman) popes and the keen intelligence with which Catherine spoke to them and other men of authority.

Stephen also both explicitly and implicitly addressed the issues that would plague Catherine’s sanctity after her death – in its original form these are the issues at the heart of the Processo Castellano, and then again in Middle English for the fifteenth-century audience amid the Hundred Years War. First, he was clear in Catherine’s mastery of theology; her words were not frivolous, they were thoughtful, learned and measured. She had not somehow fooled Gregory, as Gerson will later claim; the men who heard her (despite their learning) were edified. But he pressed this point further by stating that those who heard her, including the audience of popes before and after the Schism, recognised that ‘this is no woman that spekes’. That is, she cannot be accused of the frailties and charlatanism of the visionary woman because it is evident that ‘the holy goste’ was the voice that was heard. The emphasis that it was God speaking through Catherine, who was simply a vessel, was at the heart of his defence. To be contrary to Catherine would be to be contrary to God. She recognised that the Church should be in Rome. She recognised that Urban VI was the rightful pope. And the Roman side of the Schism was also the godly side of the war.

Stephen carefully outlined that Gregory believed Catherine to be a holy woman, but also had her vetted by his advisers – demonstrating that taking her advice was done thoughtfully, pushing back against any notion that Catherine had somehow tricked the pope into listening to the frivolous dreams of women, as Gerson would charge:

By placing the voice of concern as contemporary with Gregory, not the anachronistic voices of the Processo Castellano or writers like Gerson who retroactively indict Catherine for her influence over the pope, Stephen indicated that Gregory was properly advised, that Catherine was indeed vetted and that her revelations and advice are valid. This also validated Bridget. Each insistence in this matter reinforced Rome’s claim to the papacy, and, in turn, England’s claim in the Hundred Years War.

The papal advisers questioned Catherine extensively, finding her answers theologically sound and more learned even than her confessors. Although they came intending to find her at fault, they left fully convinced of her holiness. Stephen closed the account by adding:

These affirmations and approvals again worked in multifaceted ways for the English audience. Gregory XI’s clear favouring of Catherine also served to endorse the movement of the papacy back to Rome – it is, after all, what Catherine was doing in Avignon in the first place and it was Gregory who at her urging, along with Bridget’s, determined that it is the correct course of action. The choosing and seemingly divine favouring of Rome over Avignon implicitly bolstered the side of the English against the French.

Conclusion

For the most part, scholars have tended to see these three elements – the Hundred Years War, the Schism and the phenomenon of visionary women – in isolation from one another as evidenced by the many articles and books on these separate phenomena. But if we expand our gaze, we can see that these pieces are interconnected. This may help us understand, too, why some texts were in circulation at all, such as Stephen Maconi’s Middle English letter regarding Catherine, because they served more than one purpose.

We may begin to conclude then, by turning first to the afterlife of Bridget’s revelations which will far outlive the saint herself. They surface again in relation to Edward IV; no longer solely concerned with the claim to France, other revelations she had written concerning the rules of succession are invoked. For example, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole Rolls 26 demonstrated the genealogies of Louis (the son of king Philip of France) and Henry VI, but prominently between their two genealogical trees are excerpts from Bridget’s Revelations. Interestingly, it is not the revelation concerning England’s claim to the French throne but rather a revelation about heredity and dynastic succession that Bridget had concerning the Swedish crown. As Bridget Morris notes, when it is deployed anew in England, ‘this chapter was applied, not to Swedish politics at all, but to the English dynastic succession to attack the usurpation of the throne by Henry IV in 1399 and to urge the rights of Edward IV who assumed the crown in 1464’.⁷¹ Here we can see how military, literary and codicological histories collide and depend on one another.

But all the issues of the time and how they involve the figure of the visionary woman, the Schism and the war come together clearly in the figure of Adam Easton. This East Anglian Benedictine eventually became a cardinal and left England first for Rome (where Pope Urban V had moved his staff), and then to Avignon. Easton was interested in the heresies at home, and it is likely that under Gregory XI he was commissioned to write a condemnation of John Wyclif’s De civili dominio, a political treatise on the dominion of man and God in which he condemns the Church. Perhaps because he had already demonstrated himself to be astute at parsing and indicting heresy, he was asked in 1382 to analyse the case for Bridget of Sweden’s canonisation, and if merited, defend its orthodoxy. Easton is also working for the pope who will eventually end the Avignon Papacy, Gregory XI, but who will ultimately be seen as responsible for the Schism to follow. Easton laboured firmly in support of English interests, using his role there as an emissary to the king as well as to examine the local Wycliffite heresy in a papal context, and he was charged with validating a visionary woman and her legacy. He found Bridget fully orthodox and worthy of canonisation.

When Urban VI was elected pope after the death of Gregory XI, chaos ensued. The French faction was angry at what was a secretive election of an Italian, and one who had not been a cardinal. Several of the cardinals fled and plotted the death of Urban and elected his counterpart in Avignon at the same time – Clement VII – beginning the Schism. Easton, along with six other cardinals, was arrested by Urban VI and charged ‘that they were conspiring to force him into an admission of heresy, so that they might burn him at the stake’.⁷² All of the cardinals were tortured, and five were killed – Easton escaped that fate likely at the intervention of Richard II. Easton was at the nexus of these overlapping concerns: the validity of women’s visions and what they did or did not foretell, the Schism and its repercussions throughout the political landscape of Europe and the Hundred Years War. Moving outward from Easton, we can see how these events and concerns were deeply intertwined, each affecting the other.