Elizabeth Andersen (SML): Birgitta of Sweden and the Printing Houses of Lübeck
SML Research Seminar Series
Location: Research Beehive 2.20, Old Library Building
Time/Date: 23rd February 2012, 16:00 - 17:00
***Now online: The full ReCap recording of the lecture - listen to it and watch the powerpoint presentation***
Lübeck, the “Queen of the Hanse”, was in medieval Germany the second largest city after Cologne and the most powerful member of the Hanseatic League, that economic alliance of trading cities and their merchant guilds that dominated trade along the coast of Northern Europe. In the creation of wealth, trade establishes and fosters contacts and networks that facilitate not only economic but also cultural exchange. It is thus scarcely surprising that Lübeck should have become the most important printing centre in Northern Europe, given its strategic position.
Birgitta of Sweden (c. 1303-73) was a northern saint with European impact. After the establishment of the Brigittine Order in the 1380s, the canonisation of Birgitta in 1391 and the spread of the Brigittine cult throughout Europe, interest in her Revelations grew rapidly. It was through the commercial reach of the Lübeck printing houses that they became a bestseller in Northern Europe. This seminar takes as its focus the simultaneous dissemination of the Latin Revelationes Sanctae Birgittae and the Sunte Birgitten Openbaringe, the adaptation of Birgitta’s Revelations into Low German, the language of the Hansa. It examines the reception of the authorised visionary and prophetic text as a work of devotional literature accessible to laypeople.
Image: Birgitta receiving revelations (Openbaringe, Ghotan 1485, fol. 6v)
Published: 24th January 2012