Marguerite Porete

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Porete's life is recorded only in the accounts of her Inquisition trial for heresy, at which she was condemned to be burnt at the stake.[8] This information about Porete is probably biased and certainly incomplete. She was said to have come from the County of Hainaut, a French-speaking principality in the Holy Roman Empire, but this is uncertain. Her high level of education means she is likely to have had upper-class origins. She was associated with the beguine movement and was therefore able to travel fairly freely.[9]

Late 15th or early 16th century French manuscript of The Mirror of Simple Souls.

The title of Porete's book refers to the simple soul which is united with God and has no will other than God's own. Some of the language, as well as the format of a dialogue between characters such as Love, Virtue and the Soul, reflects a familiarity with the style of courtly love which was popular at the time, and attests to Porete's high level of education and sophistication.[14][15]

Much of the book resembles a rational Boethian style argument between several parties, but also is written similarly to the medieval French poem the Romance of the Rose.[16] Marguerite says that the Soul must give up Reason, whose logical, conventional grasp of reality cannot fully comprehend God and the presence of Divine Love. The "Annihilated Soul" is one that has given up everything except God through Love. According to Porete, when the Soul is truly filled with God's love, it is united with God and thus in a state of union which causes it to transcend the contradictions of this world. In such a beatific state it cannot sin because it is wholly united with God's Will and thus incapable of acting in such a way – a phenomenon which the standard theology describes as the effect of Divine grace, which suppresses a person's sinful nature. In fact, one of the main targets of her book is to teach to readers or listeners how to get this simple state through devices, for instance: images.[17] It is in this vision of Man being united with God through Love, thus returning to its source, and the presence of God in everything that she connects in thought with the ideas of Eckhart. Porete and Eckhart had acquaintances in common and there is much speculation as to whether they ever met or had access to each other's work.

Porete references the words of John the Evangelist in her own writing:

I am God, says Love, for Love is God and God is Love,[lower-alpha 2] and this Soul is God by the condition of Love. I am God by divine nature and this Soul is God by righteousness of Love.[lower-alpha 3] Thus this precious beloved of mine is taught and guided by me, without herself, for she is transformed into me, and such a perfect one, says Love, takes my nourishment.[19] (Chapter 21: Love answers the argument of Reason for the sake of this book which says that such Souls take leaves of the Virtues)

Porete's vision of the Soul in ecstatic union with God, moving in a state of perpetual joy and peace, is a repetition of the Catholic doctrine of the Beatific Vision, albeit experienced in this life and not in the next. Where Porete ran into trouble with some authorities was in her description of the Soul in this state being above the worldly dialectic of conventional morality and the teachings and control of the earthly church. Porete argues that the Soul in such a sublime state is above the demands of ordinary virtue, not because virtue is not needed but because in its state of union with God virtue becomes automatic. As God can do no evil and cannot sin, the exalted/Annihilated soul, in perfect union with Him, no longer is capable of evil or sin. Church authorities viewed the concept that someone was above the demands of ordinary virtue as amoral.

After Porete's death, however, the Mirror was circulated as an anonymous work. Originally written in Old French, it was translated into Latin, Italian, and Middle English and circulated widely.[20] In spite of its reputation as a heretical work it remained popular in Medieval times. At one point it was thought that John of Ruusbroec had written it.

Only in 1946 was the authorship of the Mirror recognised again, when Romana Guarnieri identified Latin manuscripts of the Mirror in the Vatican as the supposedly lost book of Marguerite.[21] The Middle French manuscript of the text, probably made after 1370, was published for the first time in 1965.[22]

A beguine represented in an incunable, printed in Lübeck in 1489.

There has been some speculation as to why Porete was considered controversial. Growing hostility to the Beguine movement among Franciscans and Dominicans, the political machinations of Philip IV of France, who was also busy suppressing the Knights Templar, and ecclesiastical fear at the spread of the anti-hierarchical Free Spirit movement have all been suggested.

Some also associated her with the Brethren of the Free Spirit, a group which was considered heretical because of their antinomian views. The connection between Porete and the Free Spirits is somewhat tenuous, though, as further scholarship has determined that they were less closely related than some Church authorities believed.[23]

Porete's status as a Medieval mystic has grown in recent decades, placing her alongside Mechthild of Magdeburg and Hadewijch in expressing the Love Mysticism of Beguine spirituality.

In 2006 poet Anne Carson wrote a poetic libretto entitled Decreation, the second part of which takes as its subject Marguerite Porete and her work, The Mirror of Simple Souls as part of an exploration of how women (Sappho, Simone Weil and Porete) "tell God."[24]

• Hildegard of Bingen
• Julian of Norwich
• Margery Kempe
• Sister Catherine Treatise

• Field, Sean L. "The Master and Marguerite: Godfrey of Fontaines' praise of The Mirror of Simple Souls," Journal of Medieval History, 35,2 (2009), 136–149.
• Field, Sean L. The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor: The Trials of Marguerite Porete and Guiard of Cressonessart (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012). ISBN 0268028923
• Sean L. Field, Robert E. Lerner, Sylvain Piron (dir.), Marguerite Porete et le "Miroir des simples âmes": Perspectives historiques, philosophiques et littéraires, Paris, Vrin, 2013. ISBN 978-2-7116-2524-6
• Michael Frassetto, "Marguerite Porete: Mysticism, Beguines and Heretics of the Free Spirit," in idem, Heretic Lives: Medieval Heresy from Bogomil and the Cathars to Wyclif and Hus (London, Profile Books, 2007), 135–150.
• P. García Acosta, Poética de la visibilidad en el Mirouer des simples ames de Marguerite Porete (Un estudio sobre el uso de la imagen en la enseñanza religiosa medieval), Universidad Pompeu Fabra, 2009 .
• S. [Zan] Kocher, Allegories of Love in Marguerite Porete's 'Mirror of Simple Souls'. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009. ISBN 2-503-51902-4.
• R. Lahav, "Marguerite Porete and the Predicament of her Preaching in Fourteenth Century France," in Laurence Lux-Sterritt and Carmen Mangion (eds), Gender, Catholicism and Spirituality: Women and the Roman Catholic Church in Britain and Europe, 1200–1900 (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011),
• Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, (1998), pp. 244–265.
• Miller, Tanya Stabler. "What's in a Name? Clerical Representations of Parisian Beguines, 1200–1327," The Journal of Medieval History, 33:1 (2007): 60–86.
• Miller, Tanya Stabler. The Beguines of Medieval Paris: Gender, Patronage, and Spiritual Authority (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) ISBN 9780812224115
• Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls, ed. Ellen Babinsky. Paulist Press, 1993. ISBN 0-8091-3427-6.
• J. M. Robinson, Nobility and Annihilation in Marguerite Porete's 'Mirror of Simple Souls'. SUNY Press, 2001. ISBN 0-7914-4968-8. .
• Swan, Laura, The Wisdom of the Beguines: the Forgotten Story of a Medieval Women's Movement, BlueBridge, 2014
• Paul Verdeyen, Marguerete Porete: Le Mirouer des Simples Ames, CCCM 69, (Turnholt: Brepols, 1986) [contains the text of the one surviving Middle French manuscript, and an edition of the Latin text]
• International Bibliography on Marguerite Porete