Abstract
Sometime between 1296 and 1306, the book Le mirouer des simples ames anienties et qui seulement demourent en vouloir et desir d’amour [The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls and Those Who Only Remain in Will and Desire of Love] by the beguine Marguerite Porete of Hainaut (b. 1250?-d. 1310) was burned in her presence by the bishop of Cambrai, Guy II, in her hometown of Valenciennes in northern France, southeast of Lille. She was simultaneously commanded to cease the dissemination of her ideas and the copying of her book. When she disobeyed the bishop’s order, the archbishop of Paris in late 1308 imprisoned her. After a period of eighteen months, in March 1310 William Humbert of Paris, the Dominican inquisitor and confessor of the king, convened a clerical panel to interrogate her (she remained silent throughout these proceedings); these clerics recorded various charges that have not fully survived.1 This commission of twenty-one canon lawyers, theological regents of the University of Paris, and her inquisitor condemned as heretical fifteen excerpted articles from her book on 31 May 1310. Porete was burned at the stake at the Place de Grève in Paris on 1 June 1310.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Note
Joanne Maquire Robinson offers several texts (in translation) in an appendix about the interrogation and censure and the 1309 Paris condemnation of Porete (including the first and fifteenth articles from the Mirror singled out for special blame), followed by the 1311 Council of Vienne bull “Ad Nostrum” against eight “Free Spirit” doctrines of the “Brethren” (a second bull at Vienne, “Cum de quisdum mulieribus,” not included in Robinson, criticized the beguines). See Nobility and Annihilation in Marguerite Porete’s “Mirror of Simple Souls,” SUNY Series in Western Esoteric Traditions (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 109–10. But see also the full discussion by Robert E. Lerner, in Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 68–78, who believes there is no evidence that this brotherhood existed; and the extant documents for both the trial against Porete and Guiard in the excellent
Paul Verdeyen, “Le Procès d’inquisition contre Marguerite Porete et Guiarde de Cressonessart (1309–1310),” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 81.1–2 (1986): 47–94. Apparently the official heretical charges have not survived, although Richard Methley’s glosses on his Latin translation of the Middle English version in 1491 convinced Edmund Colledge and Romana Guarnieri that Methley—a vicar at Mount Grace Charterhouse in north Yorkshire—may have seen the specific articles because of his justification of Porete’s text through a figurative reading: see his glosses in Colledge and Guarnieri’s “Glosses of ‘M.N.’ and Richard Methley to The Mirror of Simple Souls,” Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà 5 (1968): 357–82. See also the discussion of the investigation as summarized in
Maria Lichtmann, “Marguerite Porete’s Mirror for Simple Souls: Inverted Reflection of Self, Society, and God,” Studia mystica 16 (1995): 15–20 [4–29]; this article was revised and published as “‘Marguerite Porete and Meister Eckhart: The Mirror of Simple Souls Mirrored,” in Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics: Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete, ed. Bernard McGinn (New York: Continuum, 1994), 65–86. For gender issues in the charges, see Michael G. Sargent, “The Annihilation of Marguerite Porete,” Viator 28 (1997): 253–79.
See Lerner, Heresy of the Free Spirit, 1–2, 200–208; and John A. Arsenault, “Authority, Autonomy, and Antinominianism: The Mysticism and Ethical Piety of Marguerite Porete in The Mirror of Simple Souls,” Studia Mystica, n.s., 21 (2000): 65–94. See also Eleanor McLaughlin on the heresy of the
Free Spirit: “The Heresy of the Free Spirit and Late Medieval Mysticism,” Medieval and Renaissance Spirituality 4 (1973): 37–54. Medieval cases of the Brethren of the Free Spirit are enumerated in the first part of
Romana Guarnieri, “Il movimento del Libero Spirito,” Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà 4 (1965): 351–708, the latter half of which contains Porete’s Old French Mirror, 513–635.
Continuatio chronici Guillelmi de Nangiaco in Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, ed. J. Naudet and CF. Danou (Paris: Welter, 1894), 20:601. See also Verdeyen, “Le Procès,” 88, 89. All the documents relating to her trial and that of her beghard defender, Guiard de Cressinessart, have been included in Verdeyen, although the ones for Marguerite’s trial were originally published by Henry C. Lea, A History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages, 3 vols. (1887; repr. New York: Russell and Russell, 1955), 2:575–78; and by Paul Frédéricq, Corpus documentorum inquisitionis haereticae pravitatis neerlandicae, 5 vols. (Ghent: J. Vuylsteke, 1889–1906), 1:155–60, 2:63–64. See Robert E. Lerner for the documents in Guiard’s trial, “An ‘Angel of Philadelphia’ in the Reign of King Philip the Fair: The Case of Guiard de Cressonessart,” in
Order and Innovation in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Joseph R. Strayer, ed. William C. Jordan, Bruce McNab, and Teofilio F. Ruiz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 343–64 and 529–40. See also Lerner, Heresy of the Free Spirit, 71.
Babinsky, introduction, 26. The major Middle English text, British Library Additional 37790, was notated after 1450 by James Grenehalgh, a Shene Carthusian. While Michael Northbrook, bishop of London and founder of the London Charterhouse, may have been the translator “M.N.” of the Middle English Additional 37790 from the mid-late fourteenth century, the translation was made from a French text of the late thirteenth-early fourteenth century. The other two manuscripts in Middle English—Bodley 505 and St. John’s College Cambridge 71—both come from the early fifteenth century and were connected with the London Charterhouse, according to Romana Guarnieri, ed., Marguerite Porete: Le mirouer des Simples Ames; and Paul Verdeyen, ed., Margaretae Porete: Speculum simplicium animarum, Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio Mediaevalis 69 (Turnhout, Belg.: Brepols, 1986), vii.
See Guarnieri and Verdeyen, Le mirouer des Simples Ames/Speculum simplicium animarum, 70 [chap. 19], which includes the Old French and fifteenth-century Latin editions (the latter by Carthusian Richard Methley from the Middle English translation) on facing pages; for the modern English translation by Babinsky, see Marguerite Porete’s “The Mirror of Simple Souls,” 101. For just the early edition of the Old French text from the mid-fifteenth-century Musée Condé manuscript, see Romana Guarnieri, ed., Marguerite Porete: Le mirouer des simples ames, in “Il movimento de Libero Spirito,” Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà (Rome: n.p., 1965): 4:513–635 [351–708]. The fifteenth-century Middle English translation is available in
See Catharine Randall, “Person, Place, Perception: A Proposal for the Reading of Porete’s Mirouer des âmes simples et anéanties,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 25 (1995): 231 [229–44]. Thus, we find for Reason (or the complex faculties of knowing), the Intellect of Reason, Discretion, and the Encumbered Reason. Of the Virtues there are Faith, Hope, and Charity. Of emotional and spiritual states (some positive and some negative), we find Fear, Modesty, Astonishment, Desire, and the Unrighteous Will. But most of the specialized personifications shed light on Love (Holy Spirit) or the Soul. Of Love and the Holy Spirit, we find Pure Courtesy, Courtesy of the Goodness of Love, Faith, the Light of Faith, the Height of the Intellect of Love, Truth, the Intellect of Divine Light, FarNear, the person of God the Father, the Holy Spirit, the Supreme Lady of Peace, and Divine Love. Of the Soul we find the Seeker, Those Who Hide, Soul-Speaks-to-Love, the Intellect, the Highest Intellect, the Soul-by-Faith, the Encumbered Soul, the Spirit, the Amazed Soul, the Unencumbered Soul, the Annihilated Soul, the Intellect of the Annihilated Soul, the Nobility of the Unity of the Soul, the Astonished-Soul-in-Pondering-Nothing, the Satisfied Soul, the First Petition, the Second Petition, and the Light of the Soul.
See Maria Lichtmann, “Negative Theology in Marguerite Porete and Jacques Derrida,” Christianity and Literature 47.2 (1998): 213–27. Maria Lichtmann also describes the Mirror as “apophatic mysticism”—a term that was used by Michael Sells in “The Pseudo-Woman and the Meister: ‘Unsaying’ and Essentialism”—declaring that “Marguerite’s mysticism is not particularly affective, ecstatic, or visionary, but actually has more in common with the apophatic mysticism of the fifth-century Syrian monk, Pseudo-Dionysius.” See Lichtmann, “Marguerite Porete and Meister Eckhart,” in Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics, ed. McGinn, 65–86; and Lichtmann, “Marguerite Porete’s Mirror for Simple Souls,” 10. For Michael Sells, see “The Pseudo-Woman and the Meister: ‘Unsaying’ and Essentialism,” in Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics, ed. McGinn, 114–46.
See Jean Dagens, “Les mirouer des simples ames et Marguerite de Navarre,” in La mystique rhénane: Colloque de Strasbourg, 16–19 Mai 1961 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), 281–89. Marguerite Porete has been studied in relation to other beguine mystics, beginning with
Kurt Ruh, “Beguinenmystik: Hadewijch, Mechthild von Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 106 (1977): 265–77; and also
Kurt Ruh, “Gottesliebe bei Hadewijch, Mechthild von Madgdeburg und Marguerite Porete,” in Romanische Literaturbeziehungen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Festschrift für Franz Rauhut zum 85. Geburtstag, ed. Angel San Miguel, Richard Schwaderer, and Manfred Tietz (Tübingen, Ger.: Narr, 1985), 243–54. See also
Catherine Monique Müller, “De l’autre côté du miroir: Pour une lecture feminine du ‘Mirouer’ de Marguerite Porete et du ‘Speculum’ de Marguerite d’Oingt” (Ph.D. diss., Purdue University, 1996), which was later published as Marguerite Porete et Marguerite d’Oingt de l’autre côté du miroir, Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures (New York: Peter Lang, 1999). Müller’s ideas first appeared in
Catherine M. Bothe [Müller], “Writing as Mirror in the Work of Marguerite Porete,” Mystics Quarterly 20 (1994): 105–12.
While Joachim of Fiore in the late twelfth century had offered the general concept of an inner greater spiritual church—an Ecclesia spiritualis (Spiritual church) as an “ideal assembly of free souls”—superseding and transforming the outer lesser actual church, the more realistic later theologian Porete was content to idealize the Holy Church the Greater as an interior community without any necessary transformation of the external Holy Church the Little. See Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study from Perpetua (d. 203) to Marguerite Porete (d. 1310) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 223, for the discussion of Joachim of Fiore, who saw the lesser (actual) church being superseded—transformed—by the greater (interior) church, rather than guided by it, as in the case of Porete. An earlier version of Dronke’s discussion of Porete and the relationship to Joachim appeared in
Peter Dronke, “Lyrical Poetry in the Work of Marguerite Porete,” in Literary and Historical Perspectives of the Middle Ages: Proceedings of the 1981 SEMA Meeting, ed. Patricia W. Cummins, Patrick W. Conner, and Charles W. Connell (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 1982), 12–13 [1–18].
Porete’s work has also been argued as having influenced Eckhart himself, in Edmund Colledge and J.C. Marler, “‘Poverty of the Will’: Ruusbroec, Eckhart and The Mirror of Simple Souls,” in Jan van Russbroec: The Sources, Context, and Sequels of His Mysticism, ed. Paul Mommaers and Norbert de Paepe (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1984), 14–47. In addition, Bernard McGinn identifies Porete as belonging to “four female Evangelists” (the others besides Marguerite being Angela of Foligno, Hadewijch of Antwerp, and Mechthild of Magdeburg) who influenced the fourteenth-century mysticism of Meister Eckhart—himself accused of heresy at the end of his life. See Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics, which includes articles by Amy Hollywood, “Suffering Transformed: Marguerite Porete, Meister Eckhart, and the Problem of Women’s Spirituality,” 87–113; Lichtmann, “Marguerite Porete and Meister Eckhart,” 65–86; and Sells, “The Pseudo-Woman and the Meister: ‘Unsaying’ and Essentialism,” ed. McGinn, 114–46. See also Amy W. Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame, IN, and London: Notre Dame University Press, 1995). For Porete’s relationship with Meister Eckhart, see also
Luiz Felipe Pondè, “The Relation between the Concept of ‘Anéantissement’ in Marguerite Porete and the Concept of ‘Abegescheindenheit’ in Meister Eckhart: Meister Eckhart and the Béguines,” in What Is Philosophy in the Middle Ages? International Kongress für mittelalterliche Philosophie (1997): 311–12;
and Heidi Marx, “Metaphors of Imaging in Meister Eckhart and Marguerite Porete,” Medieval Perspectives 13 (1998): 99–108.
Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 26.
See, for example, Georgette Épiney-Burgard and Emilie zum Braun, Femmes troubadours de Dieu (Turnhout, Belg.: Brepols, 1988); and Saskia M. Murk-Jansen, “The Use of Gender and Gender-Related Imagery in Hadewijch,” in Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Jane Chance, 52–68. Robinson, Nobility and Annihilation, also sees Porete’s complex use of courtly love as an analogy for the process of annihilation, or union, with God, as similar to the metaphors of Hadewijch of Brabant and Hildegard of Bingen (102–4).
See Robert D. Cottrell, “Marguerite Porete’s Heretical Discourse; Or, Deviating from the Model,” Modern Language Studies 21 (1991): 20 [16–21], which discusses Methley’s glosses on heretical text in Porete as vindicatory. Elsewhere, Cottrell focuses on Porete’s use of language as icon, with poetry signifying the spirit, and ultimately her attempt to “articulate silence in language”: see
Robert D. Cottrell, “Marguerite Porete’s Le mirouer des ames and the Problematics of the Written Word,” Medieval Perspectives 1 (1986):152, 155 [151–58].
Kathleen Garay, “‘She Swims and Floats in Joy’: Marguerite Porete, an ‘Heretical’ Mystic of the Later Middle Ages,” Canadian Women’s Studies: Les cahiers de la femme 17.1 (1997): 19 [18–21].
Marleen Cré correctly perceives Porete as following Boethius’s theme of “spiritual ascent” in De consolatione Philosophiae, but she also describes the work inaccurately as a Macrobian oraculum—a dream vision relayed by an oracle (it is not a dream), specifically, Lady Love: Porete “proves herself to be a master of the genre.” See Marleen Cré, “Women in the Charterhouse? Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love and Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls in British Library, MS Additional 37790,” in Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England, ed. Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 55 [43–62].
See Henri d’Andeli, The Battle of the Seven Arts, ed. Louis J. Paëtow, Memoirs of the University of California, vol. 4, no. 1 [History, vol. 1, no. 1] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1914), 17–18. See also Dahlberg’s introduction to his translation of The Romance of the Rose, 2.
For discussion of the key manuscript, see Verdeyen, Margaretae Porete: Speculum simplicium animarum, vii. For other information about the manuscripts, see Michael G. Sargent, “‘Le Mirouer des simples ames’ and the English Mystical Tradition,” Abendländische Mystik im Mittelalter: Symposium Kloster Engelberg 1984, ed. Kurt Ruh (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzlersche, 1986), 443–65. Sargent acknowledges that the only other—fourteenth-century— manuscript is owned by French-speaking contemplatives outside France who do not wish to be identified or to open access to it.
Barbara Newman, “The Mirror and the Rose: Marguerite Porete’s Encounter with the Dieu d’Amours,” The Vernacular Spirit 1 (2002): 109 [105–23].
See the Rose, lines 1425–1614 in Guillaume’s portion, for the Fountain of Narcissus and the Mirror Perilous, with the crystals at the bottom of the fountain reflecting the eyes of the lover and, as the Mirror Perilous, the lady as rosebud; and in Jean’s portion, lines 20525–86, esp. 20528–30, on the holy carbuncle. All references come from Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Charles Dahlberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971). See also the discussion of mirror images in the Rose by
Alan M.F. Gunn, The Mirror of Love: A Reinterpretation of “The Romance of the Rose” (Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1952), esp. 110–12, 116, 266–73. According to Gunn, the mirror imagery begins in Guillaume with the Fountain of Love, mirroring the garden, including the lady as rosebud, and ends in Jean with the mirror of generation, taken from the chain of mirrors in the Great Chain of Being that, with increasing distance from God, reflects less distinctly His image (267). In Jean’s Rose, the mirror symbolizes “God’s bounty,” human love, generation, truth, and the allegory itself, as a “book of truth in love, an all-reflecting Mirouer aus Amoureus” (266).
See the study by Herbert Grabes, The Mutable Glass: Mirror Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
What is actually taking place at the end of the Rose has been debated recently by Karl D. Uitti, who understands the poem to celebrate growth of the self and the completion of the writing of the romance. See Karl D. Uitti, “‘Cele [qui] doit ester Rose clamee’ (Rose, vv. 40–44): Guillaume’s Intentionality,” in Rethinking the Rose: Text, Image, Reception, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 39–64.
See Garay, “She Swims and Floats in Joy,” 19. Other scholars, for example, Ellen Louise Babinsky, “The Use of Courtly Language in Le mirouer des simple ames anienties,” Essays in Medieval Studies 4 (1998): 91–106, examine The Mirror in terms of Neoplatonic philosophy and the relationship between soul and God therein. But note
Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to Woman Christ (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), who discusses Porete’s critique of Bräutmystik (eroticized relationship of the soul to God derived from imagery in the Song of Songs) in conjunction with fine amour (what Newman terms la mystique courtoise) in Hadewijch and Mechthild (137–67).
I am indebted to Joshua Cooley and Jill Delsigne for their papers on the literary Marguerite Porete, specifically, Cooley’s “Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls as Gendered Debate,” delivered at the Texas Medieval Association conference meeting at Houston, 13 October 2005, and Delsigne’s “‘Entendez la glose’: Painting Subversion in Guigemar and Le mirouer des Simples Ames,” delivered at the Forty-First International Conference on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, May 4–7, 2006. Cooley traces the gendered narrative of a masculinized (but female) Reason’s changes and eventual “death” and resurrection; Delsigne argues for Porete’s use of fable as conveying truth literally rather than allegorically—allegory representing the academic fondness for figurative meaning interpreted by means of scholastic gloss. In this practice, argues Delsigne, Porete thus resembles Marie de France a century earlier, in her creation of the fresco on which Guigemar’s imprisoned beloved gazes that depicts the burning of Ovid’s book by Venus. See also, for a study of Augustinian figurative reading, Robert D. Cottrell, The Grammar of Silence: A Reading of Marguerite de Navarre’s Poetry (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 12–15.
See Jerome Taylor, introduction to his translation of The Didascalicon of Hugh of St Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1961), 4.
See Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus, in The Anglo-Latin Satirical Poets and Epigrammatists of the Twelfth Century, ed. Thomas Wright, Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores, vol. 2 of 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1872), 369 (6.2) [268–428]; also Anticlaudianus, or The Good and Perfect Man, trans. James J. Sheridan (Toronto, ON: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1973), 160 (6.119–20).
Both Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun were associated with the Orléans region, from whose schools so many humanistic scholars sprang; Jean de Meun likely left Orléans for Paris. See Henri d’Andeli, The Battle of the Seven Arts, ed. Louis J. Paëtow, Memoirs of the University of California, vol. 4, no. 1 [History, vol. 1, no. 1] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1914), 17–18. See also Dahlberg’s introduction to his translation of The Romance of the Rose, 2. Alan of Lille probably trained at Paris.
See the thirteenth-century British Library MS Harley 3487, De anima, lines 350–53, in René Gauthier, “Le traité De anima et de potencies eius d’un maître dès artes (vers 1225),” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 66 (1982): 45 [3–86]; see also the discussion of this passage in Chance, Medieval Mythography, 2:153.
From the Roman d’Alexander by Alexander of Bernay. See Emilie zum Brunn and Georgette Épiney-Burgard, Women Mystics in Medieval Europe, trans. Sheila Hughes (New York: Paragon, 1989), 153. Alexander is also mentioned in the Rose; see the discussion in Newman, “The Mirror and the Rose,” 112.
Porete defines engin as “la substance de l’Ame” [the operation of the soul], with cognoissance (understanding) being the somme de l’Ame (height of the Soul) (Guarnieri, Mirouer, 300 [110.13–14], Babinsky, Mirror, 182). Babinsky notes that this definition appears in the Latin but not in the Old French (229 n97). Babinsky’s “skill”—engin in Old French, from the Latin ingenium—is that natural ability from which intellect springs: “C’est ung engin soubtil don’t entendement naist” (Guarnieri, Mirouer, 298 [110.13]; Babinsky, Mirror, 182). The Latin reads, “Hic ingenium subtile est substantia animae, et intellectus est operatio animae, et notitia est summa animae, quae notitia est de substantia et intellectu” (Verdeyen, Speculum, 301 [110,10–13]. A better reading (from the Latin) would have memory or common sense or imagination as the foundation of the soul, intellectual ability as the working of the soul, and understanding as the height of the soul. However, ingenium meant “invention,” “genius,” close to “imagination” or “inventiveness” (or memory), in medieval scholastic references: see Alan of Lille’s Plaint of Nature, in which Genius, priest of Nature, inscribes on parchment images, including Plato with his ingenium, trans. James J. Sheridan, Medieval Sources in Translation 26 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), as discussed by Jane Chance Nitzsche, The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1975), 112. In Middle English, kynde wit(te) comes closest: “natural ability,” “common sense.”
Copyright information
© 2007 Jane Chance
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Chance, J. (2007). Marguerite Porete’s Annihilation of the Character Reason in Her Fantasy of an Inverted Church. In: The Literary Subversions of Medieval Women. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230605596_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230605596_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-53105-9
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-60559-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)