Conclusion

Abstract

Porete believes that the essence of the self is to be found in the exaltation of a subject’s free will. Ironically, while such rapturous autonomy is evident throughout her own poetics, such striking reflections served also to condemn her to an eventual execution on the grounds of heresy. During her lengthy trial (in which an unprecedented number of consultants were employed to conduct the case against her), Porete refused to either remove her book from circulation or recant its views, perhaps fittingly for a woman who believed freedom meaningful only if it was later to be renounced and returned to God:

[in order to move the Soul] from the place where it is now and ought not to be and render it back to where it is not, whence it came, there where it ought to remain. Now the Will sees… that it cannot profit unless it departs from its own will. And thus the Soul parts herself from this will and the Will parts itself from such a Soul and then renders itself and gives and goes back to God, there where it was first taken, without retaining anything of its own… (MS, chapter 118)

And when she saw that she found nothing, she reflected in herself; and her reflection told her that she should go to seek him, as she would have him be, in the very depths of the core of the understanding of the purity of her exalted reflection; and this poor suppliant creature went to seek him there, and she resolved that she would write of God in the manner in which she desired to find him in his creatures.

And so this poor suppliant creature wrote what you hear; and it was her wish that her neighbours would find God in her, through her writings and her words…and in doing this, and saying this, and willing this, a suppliant she remained, know this well, and burdened down by herself; and she was a suppliant because this was what she wished to do.

Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls