History bears witness to the cataclysmic effect on society of inventions of new media for the transmission of information among persons. The development of writing and later the development of printing are examples.

The “Gutenberg Revolution” served as a touchstone for western intellectuals during much of the second half of the twentieth century, especially during the decades of the Cold War. The standard account, popularized by scholars such as Marshall McLuhan, tells a familiar march-of-progress narrative, in which the invention of printing happily launched western Europe into an era of intellectual, political, religious, and economic achievement. Scholars of European and global premodernity, however, never accepted the oversimplifications of this potted history, and chafed both at its assumptions about the unequivocally positive effects of the new medium and especially at all it incuriously projects onto earlier centuries, which in popular and learned accounts have been obliged, once again, to represent the darkness before the dawn of modernity.

Today we inhabit a world of temporal mirroring: for the past three decades we have been immersed in another revolution “of new media for the transmission of information” on an effectively global scale, like a vast cultural experiment taking place in real time. This unprecedentedly rapid new revolution demands a reassessment of the pieties and prejudices associated with the information-technology revolution of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by seeking a deeper awareness of the counter-currents characteristic of such moments of dramatic cultural change, including “the cataclysmic effect on society” of the new order.

The 1990s digital revolution was thought to generate, as the print revolution and its contemporary, the Protestant Reformation, is still often claimed to have generated, the unqualified good of more readers with access to vastly wider ranges of reading material. The unmediated reading of scripture, for example, finds its parallel in the immediate access to digital information. Paeans to the digital revolution still ring with the unqualified confidence of John Foxe’s praise of the printing press in Acts and Monuments, whereby “knowledge groweth, judgement increaseth, bookes are dispersed … stories be opened, times compared, truth decerned, falsehode detected.”

The optimism of the first phase of the digital revolution was not wholly unfounded.

“Bridget of Autruy” is the moniker used here for a recently rediscovered medieval visionary, the sister and intimate associate of John of Morigny, author of the Liber florum celestis doctrine: a work of visions, prayers, rituals, and experiments written in stages between 1301 and early 1316. This work, which at present remains our only source for Bridget's life and thought, was burned as heretical in Paris in 1323 but was widely copied, read, and used as an orthodox expression of Marian devotion for the next two centuries in Germany, Austria, Poland, Italy, Spain, and England, as well as France, especially, it seems, in Benedictine and Augustinian houses. After almost half a millennium of obscurity it has recently been published in full for the first time.

A decade younger than her brother, Bridget was born into a seigneurial family of no great wealth in the late 1280s, probably in Autruy, a village in the Loiret on the river Juine, midway between Orleans to the south and Etampes and nearby Morigny to the north, in the archdiocese of Sens. Here her devout mother owned a house on two floors adjoining a walled field, while the parish church, dedicated to St. Peter, contained a painted wooden statue of the Virgin of a kind widely dispersed across the region. After offering her virginity to God in her teens, partly as a result of a series of visions involving the devil, God, the Virgin, and the angels, Bridget may have lived as a beguine or other semi-religious before becoming a nun in her mid-twenties. It is not unlikely that we should be referring to her as Bridget of Rozay, the Benedictine house near Sens she may well have joined. There are signs that around this time she also became, at least briefly, a public figure. However, nothing is known about her later life or in what year she died.

Although she could read and write Latin, and although one passage may derive from her pen, there is no evidence that Bridget recorded or publicized her own visions. Nor does her status as a medieval woman intellectual rest only on the eight or so of these visions detailed in the Liber florum.

Until not many decades ago, despite the pioneering early efforts of Eileen Power and a few others, it seemed to most scholars that there was too little evidence to say anything much about the role of women in medieval intellectual and institutional culture. David Knowles, great student of English monasticism, considered the materials surviving from convents too sparse and confusing to be worth detailed study, devoting a distinguished career to the study of monks and their foundations in incongruous isolation from their female counterparts. As happens all too often in medieval studies, absence of evidence was confused with evidence of absence. Unaware of the great trove of surviving Latin, French, and English books associated with late-medieval nuns and too ready to equate learning with Latin learning, even Power imagined that, after the Anglo-Saxon period, England's convents had become intellectually stultified, ripe for the teasing treatment Chaucer metes out to the Prioress with her bad French, genteel preciosity, and passionate anti-intellectualism in The Canterbury Tales.

Although feminist scholarship has been justly critical of certain of the assumptions earlier generations brought to the study of medieval women, this was not necessarily anyone's fault. After all, if prejudice and even misogyny were sometimes part of the problem, even now new evidence for medieval women's roles and activities remains far from easy to come by. This seems to be partly because, in a patriarchal society, women were at a nearly consistent disadvantage when it came to building the kinds of institutions that kept and preserved records and partly because these records, which seldom set out to answer the specific questions we ask of them, are so often silent about issues of gender at just the moments when we most want them not to be. In many medieval contexts, gender offered a less pertinent basis for categorization than social estate, ecclesiastical estate, citizenship, or affiliation with parish, guild, manor, or household. Women escape notice for the reason that the records for the most part treat them, simply, as people.

‘Causa vitandi curiositatem verborum’

The text or textual cluster known as The Mirror of Holy Church represents one of the more egregious examples of Paul Zumthor's mouvance – the unregulated proliferation of versions and rewritings endemic to many forms of manuscript culture – found in medieval religious literature. Written in Latin in the early thirteenth century, the work could be regarded as having led a relatively decorous existence for 150 years or so, circulating widely in books that make clear the high regard in which it was held by literate Christians of different backgrounds, were it not for the fact that all twenty-eight full or partial copies that survive from before the second half of the fourteenth century preserve not the original Latin text but an elegantly colloquial translation into French (F). Making no mention that it is rendering a work first composed in Latin, this translation travelled in at least two versions, A and B, as one of the best-known insular French prose texts of the period.

It is largely as a result of this translation that the identity of the work's famous author remained known to medieval (and modern) readers. He was Edmund Rich, the learned, ascetic, and passionately driven eldest son of a well-off devout merchant couple from Abingdon. After periods of study at Oxford and Paris, Edmund became in turn master of arts and doctor of theology at Oxford (c. 1196–1202, c. 1214–22), secular canon, cathedral treasurer, and celebrated preacher at Salisbury (c. 1222–33), an unusually embattled archbishop of Canterbury (1233–40), and finally ‘seynt Edmund de Pounteny’ (as many copies of F call him), a cognomen that identifies him with the Cistercian house of Pontigny in France, where he is buried. The flurry of vitae and other life records written in the period immediately before and after his canonization in 1246 never allude to the work, and most, perhaps all, allusions to his authorship in later copies directly or indirectly derive from F.