4. =Nuns of St. Bridget.= To the Swedish princess visions of the wounded and bleeding Saviour had come in her childhood. Compelled by her parents to marry, she became mother of eight children; but at her husband’s death, in A.D. 1344, she adopted a rigidly ascetic life, and in A.D. 1363 founded a cloister at Wedstena for sixty nuns in honour of the blessed Virgin, with thirteen priests, four deacons, and eight lay brothers in a separate establishment. All were under the control of the abbess. She also founded at Rome a hospice for Swedish pilgrims and students, made a pilgrimage from Rome to Jerusalem, and died at Rome in A.D. 1373. The _Revelationes S. Brigittæ_ ascribed to her were in high repute during the Middle Ages. They are full of bitter invectives against the corrupt papacy; call the pope worse than Lucifer, a murderer of the souls committed to him, who condemns the guiltless and sells believers for filthy lucre. There were seventy-four cloisters of the order spread over all Europe. Her successor as abbess of the parent abbey was her daughter, St. Catherine of Sweden, who died in A.D. 1381. 5. The French =Annunciate Order= was founded in A.D. 1501 by Joanna of Valois, the divorced wife of Louis XII., and when abolished by the French Revolution it numbered forty-five nunneries. § 112.9. =The Brothers of the Common Life=, a society of pious priests, gave themselves to the devotional study of Scripture, the exercise of contemplative mysticism, and practical imitation of the lowly life of Christ with voluntary observance of the three monkish vows, and residing, without any lifelong obligation, in unions where things were administered in common. Pious laymen were not excluded from their association, and institutions for sisters were soon reared alongside of those for the brothers. The founder of this organization was Gerhard Groot, _Gerardus magnus_, of Deventer in the Netherlands, a favourite pupil of the mystic John of Ruysbroek (§ 114, 7). Dying a victim to his benevolence during a season of pestilence in A.D. 1384, a year or two after the founding of the first union institute, he was succeeded by his able pupil and assistant Florentius Radewins, who zealously carried on the work he had begun. The house of the brothers at Deventer soon became the centre of numerous other houses from the Scheld to the Wesel. Florentius added a cloister for regular canons at Windesheim, from which went forth the famous cloister reformer Burch. The most important of the later foundations of this kind was the cloister built on Mount St. Agnes near Zwoll. The famous Thomas à Kempis (§ 114, 7) was trained here, and wrote the life of Groot and his fellow labourers. Each house was presided over by a rector, each sister house by a matron, who was called Martha.