Bridget of Sweden was a noblewoman, married with eight children, before a series of visions beginning in earnest after her husband's death in 1344 redirected her life entirely toward religious founding work. She recorded the content of these visions in Latin, dictated to her confessors and later compiled as the Revelations, a substantial body of devotional and prophetic writing that circulated widely across medieval Europe and that she believed instructed her directly to establish a new religious order. That order, the Bridgettines, took an unusual structural form for its period: a double monastery housing both a community of nuns and a smaller community of monks on the same grounds, living under one abbess's overall authority but in physically separate quarters, organized around shared liturgical life rather than shared living space.
Bridget traveled to Rome in 1349 seeking papal approval for the new order and never returned to Sweden alive, spending her final decades largely in Italy, including a pilgrimage to Jerusalem near the end of her life, before dying in Rome in 1373. Approval for the order came only after her death, and her daughter Catherine, herself later canonized, carried the project through to completion, overseeing the construction of the abbey at Vadstena on land the Swedish crown had granted her mother years earlier. Bridget's own canonization followed in 1391, remarkably quickly by medieval standards, and her remains were returned to Vadstena to be enshrined in the abbey her visions had set in motion, making mother and daughter jointly responsible for establishing what became one of medieval Scandinavia's most significant religious institutions.