Antoinette Bourignon

Antoinette Bourignon

Antoinette Bourignon de la Porte (born January 13, 1616 in Lille , † October 30, 1680 in Franeker , Friesland ) was a Belgian mystic and separatist.

Life

The daughter of the wealthy Roman Catholic merchant Jean Bourignon grew up in Lille (Dutch: Ryssel), which was then part of the Spanish Netherlands . As a child, she was already occupied with saints' lives and sought to enter the monastery, but this was not approved by her father. Saint Augustine is said to have appeared to her around 1635 to entrust her with the reform of Christianity. Conflicts with her parents' home, expulsion from the Jesuit- led “Maison Notre Dame” and continued frequent changes of location were the result of her self-confidence as an end-time prophet, fed by further visions .

In 1648 she brought her paternal inheritance to the orphanage "Notre Dame des Sept Douleurs", which she later converted into a monastery. After allegations of harsh treatment of the children entrusted to her, many of whom she accused of possession and witchcraft , Bourignon first fled to Ghent and lived in Mechelen from 1662 to 1664 , where she wrote her autobiography La Parole de Dieu ou Sa Vie Intérieure . In 1667 she moved to Amsterdam and soon found herself in a circle of denominational persecution from all directions such as Johann Amos Comenius , Jean de Labadie and Anna Maria von Schürmann . In 1668 the chiliast Petrus Serrarius (1600–1669) proclaimed it as "divine light". Bourignon gladly accepted the role of spiritual “mother” and, through personal encouragement and numerous letters, gathered a group made up of Calvinists , Lutherans , Mennonites , Quakers , Labadists and Jews . Her followers included the famous naturalists Jan Swammerdam and Robert Boyle , who translated some of her writings, and at times Christian Hoburg . Bourignon published in French and Dutch. However, a systematic view can hardly be established from their writings. As an eclectic , she combined elements of classical mysticism ( Johann Tauler or Thomas von Kempen ) with influences from quietism and mystical spiritualism ( Jakob Böhme ).

From 1671 she was looking for a domicile for her community in the Duchy of Schleswig , as she had inherited part of the newly diked island of Nordstrand from her follower Christian de Cort, who died in 1669 . However, since this legacy mainly consisted of debt, de Cort's creditors led a year-long trial against her, so that Antoinette Bourignon was never allowed to enter Nordstrand. The group mostly lived in Husum , where conflicts with Lutheran pastors led to the confiscation of their printing works and, in 1676, to fleeing. In Hamburg she met the French Protestant theologian Pierre Poiret , who after her death became the administrator and propagandist of her intellectual heritage. Baron Dodo II of Innhausen and Knyphausen offered her refuge in 1677 at his castle Lütetsburg (Lützburg) in East Friesland . On charges of witchcraft, she had to flee again in 1680 and died on the way to Amsterdam.

aftermath

Pierre Poiret published Bourignon's biography in Amsterdam in 1684 ( The life of the virgin Antoinette Bourignon / partly written by yourself / partly written by one of her friends ) and published her complete works ( Toutes les oeuvres… ) in 19 volumes in 1679–1686 . With Pierre Bayle , among others , he had a heated argument about their meaning. Bourignon's writings had a great influence on radical pietism . Johann Jakob Schütz and Johanna Eleonora von Merlau received suggestions from them, Gottfried Arnold printed their autobiography in his Unparty Church and Heretic History . The Roman Catholic Church put its writings on the Forbidden Books Index in 1669, 1687, and 1753. Also in Protestant churches, such as the Church of Scotland , she was considered a heretic . The writer Walter Mehring made it the subject of his satirical political thriller Paris on fire in 1927 .

literature

• Ernst Schering : Adam and the snake. Androgynous myth and moralism in A. Bourignon . In: Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 10 (1958), pp. 97–124.
• Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz :  Bourignon de la Porte, Antoinette. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 1, Bautz, Hamm 1975. 2nd, unchanged edition Hamm 1990, ISBN 3-88309-013-1 , Sp. 721.
• Marthe van der Does: Antoinette Bourignon. Sa vie (1616-1680) - son oeuvre (dissertation University of Groningen 1974).
• Gerhard Philipp Wolf: Antoinette Bourignon . In: Theological Real Encyclopedia . Volume 7, 1981, pp. 93-97.
• Claude Louis-Combet: Mère des vrais croyants. Mythobiography d'Antoinette Bourignon . Paris 1983
• Leszek Kolakowski : Antoinette Bourignon. La mystique égocentrique . In: Ders .: Chrétiens sans Église. La conscience religieuse et le lien confessionel au XVIIe siècle [1969] (2nd edition, Paris 1987), pp. 640–718
• Ruth Albrecht: Denomination profile and women: Anna Maria van Schurman (1607-1678) and Antoinette Bourignon (1616-1680) . In: Yearbook of the Society for Lower Saxony Church History 96 (1998), pp. 61–75.
• Phyllis Mack: The prophetess as mother: Antoinette Bourignon . In: Hartmut Lehmann , Anne-Charlott Trepp (ed.): "In the sign of the crisis". Religiosity in Europe in the 17th Century (= publications by the Max Planck Institute for History, Volume 152). Göttingen 1999, pp. 79-100
• Mirjam de Baar: "Ik moet spreken". Het spiritueel Leiderschap van Antoinette Bourignon (1616–1680) , Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2004 digitized .
• Mirjam de Baar: International and interdenominational networks. On the early Lutheran-Pietist reception of Anna Maria van Schurman and Antoinette Bourignon . In: Ulrike Gleixner / Erika Hebeisen (eds.), Gendering Tradition. Culture of Remembrance and Gender in Pietism , Korb 2007, pp. 85–105. online PDF 24S.
• Xenia von Tippelskirch: Antoinette Bourignon. Légitimation et condamnation de la vie mystique dans l'écriture (auto) biographique: enjeux historiographiques . In: Jean-Claude Arnould, Sylvie Steinberg (eds.): Les femmes et l'écriture de l'histoire (1400–1800) . Rouen 2008, pp. 231-248.
• Mirjam de Baar: Conflicting Discourses on Female Dissent in the Early Modern Period: The Case of Antoinette Bourignon (1616–1680) . In: L'Atelier du Center de recherches historiques, 04/2009 digitized .

Web links

• Publications by and about Antoinette Bourignon in VD 17 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ digitized version .