Among the many revelations Bridget of Sweden recorded and that were later collected as her Revelations, one had an effect reaching far beyond her own order and her own century. Bridget described a vision of Christ's birth in which Mary, having knelt in prayer with her back briefly to the manger, produced her child in a sudden burst of light, and, recognising immediately what she had borne, turned and knelt before him in adoration while Joseph waited outside; the child himself, in her account, radiated a divine light around which the room's own light disappeared. This specific staging, both parents kneeling in worship before the newborn rather than the older convention showing an exhausted Mary reclining after labour, became, over the following century, the standard way the Nativity was painted and carved across Western Europe. Fifteenth century altarpieces, panel paintings and devotional art overwhelmingly adopted Bridget's version, the Adoration of the Child, in place of the reclining Virgin that had dominated earlier medieval depictions, a shift art historians trace directly to the circulation of her Revelations, particularly as her account spread outward from Italy. A private mystical vision, recorded by a widowed Swedish noblewoman decades after the fact, is therefore also, and more concretely, a documented turning point in the visual history of one of Christian art's most frequently painted scenes.