Bridget, St (properly Birgitta, afterwards transposed to Brigitta), a famous Roman Catholic saint, was born at Finstad, in the district of Upland, in Sweden, in 1302 or 1303. Her parents were of the blood-royal of Sweden. When only fourteen she married Ulf Gudmarson, afterwards 'Lagnan' (provincial judge) of Nrike, a youth of eighteen, by whom she had eight children. She was for some years mistress of the royal household, and afterwards made pilgrimages to the shrines of St Olaf at Trondheim, and of St Jago de Compostella in Spain. On their return, Ulf died in 1344, and Bridget founded about the same time the monastery of Wadstena, in East Gothland. Sixty nuns and seventeen monks, with eight lay-brothers, were its first inmates. They received the rule of St Augustine, to which St Bridget herself added a few particulars. They constituted a new order, sometimes called the order of St Bridget, sometimes the order of St Salvator, or the Holy Saviour, which flourished in Sweden until the Reformation, when it was suppressed. The order has had no fewer than seventy-four establishments scattered throughout Europe, from Finland to Spain, but has now only a few representatives in Spain, Bavaria, and Belgium. In 1349 St Bridget went to Rome, where she founded a hospice for Swedish students and pilgrims. After having made a pilgrimage to Palestine, she died at Rome on her return, 23d July 1373. Her bones were carried to Wadstena, and she herself was canonised in 1391 by Pope Boniface IX. Her festival is on the 8th of October.—Her daughter Catharine, born about 1335, died in 1381, and was canonised in 1489. She is distinguished as 'St Catharine of Sweden.' The Revelationes St Brigittæ, written by her confessors, was keenly attacked by the celebrated Gerson, but obtained the approval of the Council of Basel, and has passed through many editions, of which the earliest appeared at Rome in 1474, and the best at Lübeck in 1482. Besides the Revelationes, there have been attributed to this saint a sermon on the Virgin, and fifteen discourses on the passion of Jesus Christ. See Hammerich, Den Hellige Birgitta og Kirken i Norden (1863).
Not to be confounded with this Swedish saint is the Irish St Brigit, or Bride of Kildare (453–523). It is tolerably certain that she was the daughter of one Dubtach at Fochart Muirthemne, in Leinster, entered a monastery at Meath in her fourteenth year, through her extraordinary piety and beneficence gained great fame and influence, and founded four monasteries, the first and chief of these at Kildare, where, after her death, she was buried, and a perpetual fire was kept up in her memory. The rest of her traditional history is a mass of astonishing miracles, and it is supposed that many of these, along with the sacred fire (which was abolished by the bishop of the diocese in 1220), were transferred to St Brigit from the heathen goddess Ceridwen, the Celtic Ceres, on the ruins of whose chief sanctuary the monastery at Kildare was built. In many old legends and hymns she is celebrated as the 'Maria Hibernorum,' and in the Officium St Brigidæ (Paris, 1622) as 'Altera Maria.' Her day falls on the 1st of February. She was regarded as one of the three great saints of Ireland, the others being St Patrick and St Columba. She was held in great reverence in Scotland, and was regarded by the Douglasses as their tutelary saint. The earlier Lives of St Bridget are collected in Colgan's Trias Thaumaturga (1647). See Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, iii. 75, and Dr J. H. Todd's Book of Hymns of the Ancient Church of Ireland (Dublin, 1855).