BOURIGNON DE LA PORTE, ANTOINETTE. - Visionary, b. 13 Jan. 1616 at Lille (France), d. 30 Oct. 1680. Of a restless, eccentric, fanciful temperament, she imagined from her youth that she had visions and ecstasies. Having refused various marriages, at the age of twenty she fled from her father's house and began her wandering life, believing herself called to revive the spirit of the primitive simplicity and purity of the Gospel, and seeking to that end to gather followers. Having returned to Lille upon her father's death (1648) and having won the lawsuit for the inheritance against her stepmother, she accepted, in 1653, on the proposal of Jean de St-Saulieu, the direction of a girls' orphanage. When an inquiry was begun by the authorities amid grave suspicions, she fled to Ghent (1662), then to Malines (1663), where she found a faithful follower in Christian de Cort. In her conversations with him, published later under the title La lumière du monde (Oeuvres, VI and VII), she declares herself the woman of the Apocalypse who must give birth in sorrow to spiritual children; and against the Catholic Church, in which the antichrist reigns, she rejects the Baptism of children and falsifies the dogma of the Most Holy Trinity. After a stay in Amsterdam (1667) and in Haarlem (1670), she succeeded in 1672 in setting up her own printing press at Husum (Schleswig) for her propaganda writings, but she was soon embroiled in bitter polemics and accused of heresy and witchcraft. The preacher G. H. Burchhardt, in a work of his against her: Christliche gründliche Anmerkungen über die groben Irrtümer der A. B. (Schleswig, March 1674), pushed the authorities to intervene. The printing press was confiscated and her writings burned by the executioner (Apr. 1674).
We find her next at Flensburg, where M. Wolfgang Ouw attacked her with the Apocalypse Haeresea (Hamburg 1675), then at Schleswig (1675) and at Hamburg (1676), where she hid for 15 months. There the Calvinist mystic Pierre Poiret reached her, and he never left her again. Discovered once more, she took refuge at Lütelsburg with Baron Dodo von Knijphausen (1677); accused by a former follower, La Costa, of being a witch and a fraud, she tried to reach Amsterdam, but having fallen ill on the journey, she died at Franeker (Frisia).
A skilled writer, of lively style, she left many works, among them two autobiographies: La parole de Dieu ou sa vie intérieure (Malines 1663), which asserts her supposed vocation as a mystic reformer; La vie extérieure (Amsterdam 1668), in which she recounts her eventful life. All her writings, of which the principal ones are: La lumière née en ténèbres; L'aveuglement des hommes de maintenant; Le nouveau ciel et la nouvelle terre; L'autéchrist découvert; Le renouvellement de l'esprit évangélique, were published in 19 vols.: Toutes les Oeuvres de Mlle A. B. (Amsterdam 1679-86), by P. Poiret, who prefaced them with a complete biography and an apologetic preface. They were placed on the Index by decrees of 28 Nov. 1669, 15 May 1687 and 10 May 1757.
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Anselmo Musters