SOURCE: Newman, Barbara. “The Mirror and the Rose: Marguerite Porete's Encounter with Dieu d'amours.” In The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature, edited by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Bradley Warren, pp. 105-23. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

[In the following essay, Newman evaluates the extent to which Porete's The Mirror of Simple Souls may have been stylistically and thematically influenced by the thirteenth-century Roman de la rose.]

Several years ago I proposed the new term mystique courtoise to categorize an array of vernacular mystical texts from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, especially but not solely those written by beguines.¹ The concept of mystique courtoise is meant to distinguish traditional forms of spiritual writing that drew on the lush imagery of the Song of Songs to characterize divine love, as Christian mystics had done ever since Origen, from a newer literary/religious mode that self-consciously inflected this tradition with the vernacular language of fine amour, adapted from secular lyrics and romances.

While the connection between courtly literature and this new mode of mystical writing has long been recognized, most studies to date have confined themselves to the borrowing of widespread motifs, such as boundless longing, amor de lonh, or love from afar, prolonged and humiliating love-service, and certain stock characters (Frau Minne, the Christ-knight, the soul as princess-bride). Few scholars have set out to illustrate the debts of specific mystical writers to specific courtly texts, and generally with good reason. In the case of lyric, the repertoire of themes, tropes, and even rhyme schemes was so universally shared by poets within the tradition that it would be nearly impossible to prove a mystic's literary debt to one trouvère or minnesinger rather than another. But with longer and more distinctive texts, such as romances, a closer reading of secular and mystical intertextuality may be possible. In this essay I will posit a literary relationship between Marguerite Porete's Mirouer des simples ames² and its unlikely intertext, the Roman de la rose.

Now the linkage of a cynical, insistently secular love allegory with the most esoteric of mystical texts may seem arbitrary, even whimsical. But it becomes much less so when we recognize that in the Middle Ages, textual communities were not yet rigorously divided along the sacred/secular divide that operates today in our classrooms. The crusading Bishop Fulk of Toulouse and the missionary theologian Ramon Llull, not to mention Dante, all began their careers as poets of fine amour. Manuscript miscellanies commonly included romance literature and other secular texts side by side with devotional works, and even vowed religious were keenly aware of the popular literary currents of the day. In the seventy years that separate Guillaume de Lorris's Rose from Marguerite's Mirror, a culture of mystique courtoise developed quite rapidly in the francophone world, with the already celebrated Rose among its key points of reference. To indicate the course of this development, I will begin with a brief look at two works, now little known, that Marguerite might easily have read.

It was around 1250—a generation after Guillaume's Rose, but before Jean de Meun's—that Gérard of Liège wrote his Quinque incitamenta ad deum amandum ardenter, or Five Incitements to the Ardent Love of God.³ Gérard was the Cistercian abbot of Val Saint-Lambert, in the heart of beguine country, and may have composed this extraordinary treatise for an audience of beguines and their confessors as well as monks. But he plainly assumed that his readers, male or female, would be as steeped as he was in the literature of fine amour. The treatise is part of a diptych: Its companion tract, Seven Useful Remedies against Illicit Love, is a wholly predictable text teaching contempt of the world and its corollary, contempt of women.⁴ In Five Incitements, however, Gérard takes a different tack. Following the lead of Richard of St. Victor, he shows that divine and carnal love, though opposed in morality, are exactly the same in psychology.⁵ But Gérard goes further than Richard, for along with citations from Augustine, pseudo-Augustine, and Bernard, he includes a generous sprinkling of French love songs among his auctores. For instance, to reinforce his point that God asks nothing but our love in return for all his gifts to us, he quotes this lyric:

Quankes il fist entiere
il le fist pour mamour auoir,
et quankes ie ferai dorenavant
ie le ferai pour plaire a lui seulement
et pour samour auoir.(6)

[Whatever he has done till now / he has done to win my love, / and whatever I do henceforth / I will do to please him alone / and to win his love.]

Anticipating Marguerite, Gérard also cites the maxim that “God is love” (1 John 4:8) in order to identify the creator of the world with the fine amour sung by poets, and even the dieu d'amours so memorably portrayed by Guillaume de Lorris: “Deus enim caritas est, dicit Iohannes, idest amours.” [God is love, says John, that is, amours].⁷ But if caritas and amours could have the same denotation, their connotations differed radically, so in equating them Gérard is performing a remarkable sleight-of-heart trick. To love God, he wants to say, is to practice fine amour, and he can even take St. Paul to witness (1 Cor. 13:1): If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not charity—“idest, se ie naime par amours”—it profits me nothing.⁸ A lover aspiring to please the God who is Love, like one who wishes to please the old pagan god of love, must be gracious in heart and body: “Oportet esse gratiosum exterius et deuotum interius eum qui uult amare et au diu damours placere” [One who wishes to love and to please the God of Love ought to be outwardly gracious and inwardly devoted].⁹ Here, with surprisingly little ado, Gérard has transmogrified the capricious winged archer of Ovid and Guillaume into Jesus Christ. We must recall that the abbot wrote this tract before Jean de Meun completed the Rose, so he probably envisioned the diu damours as a genteel and idealized figure, rather than the opportunistic, heavily ironized deity who finally secures the lover's Rose.

Like a lyric husband, says Gérard, the biblical God is jealous, so his lovers may share the sentiments of the mal-mariée in the song:

Quant plus me bat et destraint li ialous,
tant ai ie mius en amours ma pensee.
Deus enim, ut dixit Moyses, est fortis zelotes (Exod. 20.5), idest ialous.(10)

[The more the jealous one beats and confines me, / the more I think of love. / For God, as Moses said, is very jealous.]

But Gérard is willfully distorting the lyric situation, for the female speaker in the song intends to contrast her jealous, violent husband with the lover she refuses to abandon. Gérard, on the contrary, conflates the jealous husband with the desired lover: The female speaker in his scenario loves God all the more in spite of, or rather because of, his violence. This interpretation is confirmed by another passage in which Gérard presents God as the most desirable lover because he is not only the most beautiful and devoted, but also the most aggressive and threatening:

If our love requires violence, cest con li face force, no one will do greater violence to attain it than he. For he seeks it as if with an unsheathed sword: either you will love him or you will die an eternal death. Hence David says, “unless you are converted” from love of the world to the love of God, “he will brandish his sword” (Ps. 7:13). So here a certain popular song can be applied: Tout a force maugre uostre uorsai uostre amour auoir [By main force, in spite of you I will have your love.]¹¹

Some such formulation may underlie Marguerite's startling reference to God as “le treshault Jaloux” whose love robs the soul of her very self: “He is jealous indeed! This is apparent from his works, which have despoiled me of my whole self and set me in divine pleasure without myself.”¹² The Free Soul rejoices in this high estate, just as Gérard presumes the beloved will do when God ravishes her at sword point, “tout a force.”

In his discussion of “insuperable love” (one of Richard of St. Victor's “four degrees of violent charity”), Gérard again anticipates Marguerite. Love is rightly compared to death, he writes, because both are invincible: No one can taste either love or death without losing all the powers of his body and soul. “Thus love or charity is undoubtedly the strongest passion, which no one can feel or experience without necessarily losing all his senses and bodily movements; and even the movements of the soul, i.e., his knowledge, his power, and his will, are taken captive in love's service. Augustine, li anguisseus damours, was keenly aware of this when he said, “Mighty and almighty is the passion of love! It is indeed powerful, because it renders the spirit possessed by it powerless over itself.”¹³ Marguerite's Free Soul likewise has “lost the use of her senses”:¹⁴ She knows nothing, wills nothing, and can do nothing, being completely powerless and wholly possessed by Love.

Gérard's editor in the early 1930s, the distinguished Benedictine André Wilmart, was annoyed by his author's frequent resorts to the vernacular. Wilmart wondered if Gérard's fondness for French tags might be due to “an odd sort of quirk … an instinctive and bizarre desire to distinguish himself … by means of this somewhat childish artifice.”¹⁵ But from a contemporary critical perspective, Gérard's “quirk” makes more sense, for his unusual macaronic style marks him as one of the forgers of la mystique courtoise. This new idiom of divine love blended not only two languages, but the diverse thought-worlds they represented: the Latinate realm of monastic bridal mysticism, known to Gérard primarily through Augustine and Bernard, and the vernacular realm of courtoisie represented by his French lyrics. Peter Dronke was closer to the mark when he observed that “if sacred and profane love are wholly divorced, as by Gérard, then, as nothing is found in the intellect which was not first found in the senses, their metaphorics will be identical, as much as if they were wholly united.” Further, “the more deeply religious the language, the closer it is to the language of courtoise.”¹⁶ The two languages—the Song of Songs and the tongue of the trouvères—have fused completely by the last page of Gérard's treatise, when the “holy soul” cries out, “Oi, osculetur me, mes tres dous amis, osculo oris sui!” [Ah, let him kiss me, my sweetest love, with the kiss of his mouth!]¹⁷

About fifty years later, an anonymous French cleric would advance the tradition of Gérard's mystique courtoise, placing vernacular thought and language at the service of that most Latinate of genres, the religious rule. La Règle des fins amans, a sprightly beguine rule contemporary with Marguerite's Mirror, systematically characterizes beguines as courtly lovers and represents their religious life as “li ordres des fins amans” [the order of true lovers].¹⁸ Among the many romance conceits adopted by its author is a miniature allegory, transparently borrowed from the Rose, that concludes the rule. In this fable Conscïence, or Desire, the heroine, is yearning after her beloved Jesus when Jealousy appears with news that monastics—li cloistriés—have imprisoned him. So Conscïence breaks into the monastery garden, assisted by several Virtues, including Charité and Fine Amours, and is soon reunited with her love. This truncated plot pays homage to the central action of the Rose, in which Jealousy builds a castle to imprison Fair Welcome and keep the Lover from his goal. Thus the Règle des fins amans tells us something of the jealousy beguines must have felt toward cloistered nuns. But it also tells of their immersion in the culture of fine amour, for its author was able to assume that his readers would recognize the Rose allegory and doubtless smile at its transmutation. Marguerite Porete, a more than usually sophisticated member of the target audience, may or may not have known the Règle (it is not impossible that she even knew its author),¹⁹ but it is certain that she knew the Rose.

Let us turn to that formidable poem itself. Halfway through the Roman de la rose, the God of Love makes a “prophetic” speech foretelling the career of Jean de Meun, who is to become Love's protégé by completing Guillaume de Lorris's unfinished poem and disseminating it in “crossroads and schools” all over France. In the act of appropriating Guillaume's romance, Jean and the God of Love give it a new name: The poem will no longer be called Le Roman de la rose but Le Miroër as amoreus, [The Mirror for Lovers]. All who read this book “properly” will find great good in it, says Love, provided they are not led astray by his adversary, Lady Reason. Thus the book's authorship and its revised title are closely linked with its ostensible purpose, which is to promote Love by discrediting Reason:

… tretuit cil qui ont a vivre
Devroient appeler ce livre
Le Miroër as amoreus,
Tant i verront de bienz por eus,
Mes que Raison n'i soit creüe,
La chetive, la recreüe.

(lines 10649-54)²⁰

[All who are living / ought to give this book / the title The Mirror for Lovers. / They will see so much good in it, / if they do not believe Reason, / that miserable coward.]

Marguerite too wrote a mirror for lovers: The full title of her book may be rendered as The Mirror of Simple, Annihilated Souls Who Live Only in the Will and Desire of Love. And she too aimed to discredit Reason, who is the chief antagonist of Lady Love and her protégée, the Free Soul. The very form of Marguerite's text—a sprawling and, at first blush, shapeless allegorical dialogue—seems to be self-consciously modeled on the Rose. In fact, it would be difficult to think of any other generic model for the Mirror, which bears little or no formal resemblance to any religious literature Marguerite could have known, whether we think of homilies, vision narratives, spiritual autobiography, saints' lives, exegesis, or systematic treatises like those of Richard of St. Victor and Gérard of Liège.²¹ Her most recent translators, the late Edmund Colledge in collaboration with Jack C. Marler and Judith Grant, have likewise acknowledged Marguerite's formal and rhetorical debt to the Rose, although their analysis is hampered by an overly simplistic interpretation of what they call “Perfect Love.”²²

In naming her book a Mirror, Marguerite was following a thirteenth-century fashion, so there would be little point in positing a specific source for the title. Nevertheless, if we think of the Rose by the alternative title Jean de Meun gave it, The Mirror for Lovers, we may pay more attention to two key passages on mirroring that did, I believe, influence our beguine. The first, by Guillaume de Lorris, is the famous “Mirror of Narcissus” episode near the beginning of the romance; the second, by Jean de Meun, occurs in Nature's speech near the end.

The Narcissus episode occurs when the Lover, already stalked by the God of Love but not yet smitten, discovers the celebrated Fountain of Love, with its two reflecting crystals and its memorial inscription. After describing the fountain at some length, Guillaume compares it to a mirror:

C'est li mirëors perilleus,
Ou Narcisus li orguilleus
Mira sa face et ses yex vers,
Dont il jut puis mors touz envers.
Qui en cest mirëor se mire
Ne puet avoir garant ne mire:
Que tel chose a ses yex ne voie
Qui d'amer l'a tost mis en voie.
.....Ici se changent li corage,
Ci n'a mestier, sens ne mesure,
Ci est d'amer volenté pure,
Ci ne se set consillier nus.

(lines 1571-87)

[This is the Mirror Perilous / in which Narcissus, that proud man, / gazed on his face and his grey eyes, / and afterward lay stark dead. / Whoever looks in this mirror / can have no help, no physician: / whatever he lays eyes upon, / he is instantly bound to love … / Here is where hearts are changed: / here sense and measure have no place; / here is just the pure will to love; / here no one can take counsel.]

The dreamer of Guillaume's poem both repeats and avoids the mistake of Narcissus. Although he does gaze into the Mirror Perilous and falls hopelessly in love, it is not himself that he sees there, but the Rose.²³ That, however, may be a moot point. What Marguerite would have found most compelling in this description is not so much Narcissus' fate as the absoluteness of love, that immoderate and irresistible changer of hearts. To peer into the Mirror Perilous is to abandon Reason—sens ne mesure—for the relentless imperative of Love's pure will. Of course this view of love is not novel or unique to the Rose, but Guillaume's scene gives it a kind of iconicity, compressing into a single densely packed image the magical fountains so ubiquitous in romance plots, the exemplum of Narcissus, the ambiguity of the mirror in which he both discovers and loses himself, and the era's fascination with fatal, incorrigible love.

Almost sixteen thousand lines later, Jean de Meun revisits the subject of mirrors. In a long discourse on free will and providence, Nature introduces the metaphor of divinity itself as a mirror. Whatever has been, is, or shall be, God sees from eternity:

… A son mirooir pardurable,
Que nulz fors li ne set polir,
Sanz rienz a franc voloir tolir.
Cis mirooirs est il meïmes,
De qui commencement preïmes.
En ce biau mirooir poli,
Qu'il tient et tint touz jors o li,
Ou tout voit quanqu'il avendra
Et touz jors present li rendra
Voit il ou les ames iront
Qui loiaument le serviront …
C'est la predestinacion,
C'est la prescience devine,
Qui tout set et rienz ne devine.

(lines 17468-86)

[… in his everlasting mirror, / that no one but he can polish / without detracting from free will. / This mirror is God's own self, / from whom we took our beginning. / In this lovely, polished mirror / which he holds and has always held, / where he sees all that will happen, / and renders it always present / he sees where the souls of those go / who will loyally serve him. / … This is the predestination, / this is the divine foreknowledge, / which knows all and guesses nothing.]

In this passage, indebted to Boethius and Alan of Lille, Jean equates the mirror of providence or divine foreknowledge with “God's own self” (il meïmes).²⁴ Like Guillaume de Lorris, though less programmatically, he imagines a mirror that is also a fountain, in the dual sense of “reflecting surface” and “source of life.” Thus, from the “mirror” that is God or God's eternal mind, all creatures “took [their] beginning.” Yet only God can “polish” this mirror without detracting from free will; in other words, if any creature could see past, present, and future as God does, its freedom would be compromised. So just as one who gazes into Guillaume's Mirror of Love (mirëor perilleus) is in danger of losing his reason, one who gazes into Jean's Mirror of Providence (mirooir pardurable) would be in danger of losing free will. For Marguerite Porete, the lover of God's infinity, these two mirrors are one and the same.

Unlike the Rose poets, Marguerite does not use explicit mirror images in her text. But her title is most apt, for the concept of mirroring or specularity pervades the entire dialogue.²⁵ In fact, Marguerite's opening parable of the maiden and King Alexander distantly echoes the Mirror of Narcissus episode. This classic exemplum of amour loingtaigne, borrowed from the Roman d'Alexandre, is told by Amour. In it, the maiden who has fallen in love with the faraway king has his portrait painted (“fist paindre ung ymage qui representoit la semblance du roy”), and through her devotion to the image, “songa le roy mesmes” [she dreamed the king himself].²⁶ The Soul responds by telling Amour of her own “similar” experience: She too has come to love “a noble Alexander,” but the picture she has of him is “this book,” which is his gift to her: “Il me donna ce livre qui represente en aucuns usages l'amour de lui mesmes” [He gave me this book, which shows in some usages the love of himself]. The hidden third term mediating between “image” and “book” is “mirror,” the book's title. With pointed ambiguity, Marguerite represents her book or Mirror, which reflects the king's image, as at the same time his gift and her creation.²⁷ Like Guillaume's Lover, the Soul only dreams of her Beloved whom she does not yet possess, yet her dream is his true reflection. He underwrites what she writes, just as the Soul's opening speech deliberately mirrors Love's speech.

While the Soul's relation to Love is not precisely narcissism, it is an intense and mutual mirroring that begins with their very names, Ame and Amour, and continues throughout their dialogue: Love describes and praises the Soul, while the Soul explains and celebrates Love. Ultimately, the Free Soul becomes the Love that she beholds, or in a more precise formulation, she becomes an unclouded mirror in which Love beholds only itself.²⁸ The title Mirouer des simples ames has therefore a double reference. Marguerite's book is itself a Mirror of Narcissus into which souls, gazing intently, may lose themselves and find God in the volenté pure d'amer: “And so this beggarly creature wrote what you hear; and she wanted her neighbors to find God in her, through writings and through words.”²⁹ Yet this divine mirror, which proved so perilous to its author, is in the end a mere painted image. For the Soul must acknowledge, in taking leave of it, that her book “has been made by human knowledge and human sense,” and “all that one can say or write of God … is to lie far more than it is to tell the truth.”³⁰ The only true mirooir pardurable is the divine mind itself. No one can gaze in this mirror, as Nature warned in the Roman de la rose, without sacrificing franc voloir, which is presumably Marguerite's final wish for herself and her audience. In her leave-taking, the Soul suggests that the act of will involved in writing the book—or polishing the mirror—has been the final thread, now severed, that kept her from her goal of annihilation.³¹

After Guillaume's Lover gazes into the fountain of Narcissus and sees the Rose, he is promptly wounded by the God of Love and compelled to do homage. Love then presents him with the “commandments” that the Lover has already promised to obey. In Marguerite's Mirror, too, the parable of the maiden with the king's image immediately precedes the giving of Love's commandments. Presented as the commands of Holy Church, these are actually the Gospel imperatives to love God with all one's heart and soul and strength, and one's neighbor as oneself.³² The speaker who expounds these commandments is neither Christ nor Holy Church, but once again Amour, a female figure who is sometimes called Dame Amour.³³

Love's gender is a complex and curious signifier in Marguerite's dialogue. In the Rose and other texts influenced by Ovid, the dieu d'amours is a male deity identified with Cupid. Amor is a masculine noun in Latin, and in all medieval translations of the Mirror (Latin, Italian, and English), grammar dictates a reinscription of Love's male gender: Thus Dame Amour becomes Domine Amor.³⁴ Marguerite's French text, however, intensifies the specular relationship between Love and the Soul by keeping them both feminine. As a kind of goddess-figure, her Dame Amour seems to echo not so much the Rose as the troubadours, who cultivated a deliberate confusion between their personified feminine Love and the beloved lady, just as Dame Amour reflects and coalesces with Dame Ame.³⁵

On a different level, however, the strategy of the Mirror is indebted here as well to the Rose, especially to Guillaume's portion of it. One of the Rose's most original features is its fragmented representation of the Beloved. The Rose itself represents her body, and in the end her genitals, but it cannot represent her subjectivity. Unlike the Lover, the beloved lady is never portrayed as a unified subject, but her aspects are parceled out among personifications of both genders who side with and against the Lover: Franchise, Pitié, Honte, Poor, Dangier, and of course, Bel Acuel or “Fair Welcome.” The last-named personage is the Lover's chief goal and ally until he can gain access to the Rose itself. Now Guillaume could easily have chosen a feminine persona—Courtoisie, for example, or Franchise or Amitié—to represent the lady's friendly, welcoming demeanor. But in fact he chose the cross-gendered figure of Bel Acuel, whose name will chime later on with coilles [testicles] and cuellir [to pluck/deflower], much to Jean de Meun's pleasure.³⁶ Bel Acuel's maleness seems to come and go in the text: la Vieille calls him “son” but gives “him” some intense girl-to-girl mentoring, and in illuminated manuscripts, he appears usually as a young man but occasionally as a woman.³⁷ If we take the putative maleness of Fair Welcome as a significant trait, it can be read in a variety of ways—as “queering” the Lover's affair, or as ennobling it with a patina of courtly friendship,³⁸ or as ensuring a measure of equality between the prospective partners.³⁹ But however we interpret Bel Acuel, his prominence alongside the Rose and her more “female” aspects assures that the Beloved will be a complex and enigmatic being whom her Lover may impregnate, but never fully fathom.

With this fragmentation of the Beloved in mind, let us return to Marguerite. We have considered Dame Amour as the mirror image and alter ego of the Soul, but she is more: She is also, quite explicitly, the chief mouthpiece of God in the dialogue. “I am God,” she tells the scandalized Reason, “because Love is God and God is Love—and this Soul is God by the condition of love.”⁴⁰ But Amour is not the only divine speaker in the text, which also features cameo appearances by God the Father, the Holy Spirit, the Bridegroom of the Soul, and the Trinity. Marguerite's God may be metaphysically simple, but s/he is relationally complex, multifaceted, and, like the Rose, androgynous. In one sense, the femininity of Amour functions, like the masculinity of Bel Acuel, to denaturalize gender. When a “Lady” speaks for God or a “man” for a lady, the unexpected cross-gendering compels us to question both erotic and theological conventions. Thus the Free Soul's love of God, like the Lover's passion for his Rose, reveals what could be called a homoerotic dimension beneath its surface. But however titillating this may be for modern readers, I do not believe medieval audiences would have found it so. For, in a different sense, the androgyny of the Beloved actually makes gender less relevant to the Lover's quest, since the blurring or effacing of sexual difference places the emphasis on sameness, the prospect of identity between Lover and Beloved. We will never know what Guillaume de Lorris may have intended in this regard: His poem breaks off with Fair Welcome in prison and the Lover in despair. Marguerite, however, decidedly preferred identity or “union without difference” to the tempestuous drama of the love-quest. Insofar as she identified with the position of the Free Soul, she was openly critical of the erotic mysticism cultivated by many nuns and beguines, which she regarded as an inferior brand of love and wished to transcend in a serene unity beyond the intoxicating sweetness of romance.⁴¹

Nevertheless, the Mirror does introduce an avatar of the divine Bridegroom: the mysterious male figure Marguerite calls Loingpres or “Farnear,” recalling her parable of King Alexander and the maiden. In keeping with her suspicion of Brautmystik, Marguerite never describes union with this lover in the sexualized language characteristic of other beguine mystics, but she does end her dialogue with a song of fulfillment that may, in a supremely paradoxical sense, pay one last homage to the Rose. Jean de Meun's romance notoriously ends with the pregnancy of the newly plucked rose, a datum conveyed through horticultural metaphors so gleeful and transparent that Christine de Pizan would accuse the poet of obscenity.⁴² Oddly enough, while pregnancy is not the consummation one would predict for a soul “annihilated in the will and desire of love,” Marguerite's Free Soul concludes her song with these lines:

J'ay dit que je l'aymeray.
Je mens, ce ne suis je mie.
C'est il seul qui ayme moy:
Il est, et je ne suis mie:
Et plus ne me fault,
Que ce qu'il veult,
Et qu'il vault.
Il est plain,
Et de ce suis plaine
C'est le divin noyaulx
Et amour loyaulx.(43)

[I have said that I will love him. / I lie, for it is not “I” at all. / It is he alone who loves me: / He is, and I am not: / and I have no need / of more than what he wishes / and what he is worth. / He is full, / and from this I am filled: / this is the seed divine / and loyal love.]

The mischief in these lines turns on a characteristic double entendre: de ce suis plaine can mean something like “he is my fulfillment,” but it can also mean “I am pregnant by his fullness.”⁴⁴ Similarly, the noyaulx suggests the heart or core of divine love, as in the familiar exegetical metaphor of chaff and kernel; but it can also mean “seed,” as in the grenes that Jean's Lover spills to fertilize his rosebud. Now pregnancy is hardly an integral theme in the Mirror, but the sudden appearance of this new subtext in the very last lines of her book suggests that Marguerite had, consciously or not, a reminiscence of that older Mirror for Lovers in the back of her mind. Like the Rose, the Free Soul becomes “pregnant” at the moment that her subjectivity is most fully annihilated by the overpowering love of her ami.

One of the most scandalous teachings of the Mirror was Marguerite's claim that the Free Soul, perfected in love, “takes leave of the virtues” and owes no more service to them or their ally, Reason.⁴⁵ The imperfect soul, Love proclaims, remains in bondage to Reason and the Virtues, who “demand honor and possessions, heart and body and life.” But once the souls who dwell in Love are emancipated from this serfdom, they become ladies and “the Virtues do all that such souls wish, without pride or rebellion, for such souls are their mistresses.”⁴⁶ All this may seem a far cry from the Rose. But here again, I believe, Marguerite presupposes the familiar plot of the romance, with its central conflict between Love and Reason, and adapts it for her purposes. In the Rose, the Lover twice rejects the counsel of Reason—briefly in Guillaume's text, then definitively in Jean's. Lady Reason begins the long speech that Jean gives her by denouncing the God of Love as a cruel seignor; she ends by asking the Lover to forsake the god's service and accept her instead as his amie. But the Lover scorns her and insists that virtuous love, which she advocates, has been impossible ever since antiquity when the Virtues fled the earth, driven off by Fraud.⁴⁷ After he has sent Reason packing, the Lover seeks out the cynical and misogynistic Ami, and from this point onward, he truly takes leave of the Virtues. By the end of the romance, the naive but well-intentioned youth introduced by Guillaume will have become complicit in treachery, murder, bribery, and arguably rape.⁴⁸ This is not to say that Jean's intention is consistently or even primarily moralistic; but it is to say that in the universe he constructs, no man can serve two masters. The Dreamer must choose between Love and Reason, between the Rose and the Virtues—and choose he emphatically does.

Marguerite accepts this dichotomy and her Free Soul makes the same choice, but she views it from the other side of the fence. For the sake of argument, I will hold with the long line of critics (beginning circa 1400) who have maintained that, whatever else he may be doing, Jean de Meun is ironizing the Lover. On that reading, it is Reason who speaks for the poet, and once our protagonist has rejected her, the subsequent plot unmasks his pretensions to fine amour as no more than fole amour.⁴⁹ As he pursues his passion, he becomes progressively enmeshed in vice. In the Mirror, by contrast, the Free Soul does not dismiss the Virtues in order to revel in vices. She rises above their level rather than sinking beneath it, and if she is guilty of anything, it is quietism, rather than gross sin or crime. Yet Reason is alarmed all the same and staunchly resists the absolutism of Love and the Soul. Now the difference between the foolish Lover's quest and the mystic's may seem painfully obvious—so obvious as to render comparison otiose. Yet it was not at all obvious to Marguerite's inquisitors, who followed the script she had laid out for them by insisting that Holy Church must be governed by Reason. Thus nothing in the Mirror antagonized them more than Marguerite's assertion that the Free Soul takes leave of the Virtues. Despite her careful insistence that the Virtues continue to operate in such souls, she was taken to be preaching antinomianism, and this claim became central to the case against her.⁵⁰ A year after her execution, her statement about taking leave of the Virtues was condemned once again at the Council of Vienne, among other errors ascribed to beguines and beghards concerning the state of perfection.⁵¹

In a second condemned proposition from the Mirror, Love states that the Free Soul “gives to Nature all that it requires, with no qualm of conscience; but such a Nature is so well ordered by its transformation in unity with Love … that it never demands anything which is forbidden.”⁵² Evidently Marguerite's inquisitors did not believe such a transformation possible in this life. By 1312, the clerics at Vienne would amplify this condemned doctrine, adding a codicil that does not appear in Marguerite's book but may have been inspired by it. This is the interesting proposition “that a woman's kiss is a mortal sin when Nature does not incline to it; but the carnal act itself is no sin when Nature does incline to it, especially when the one performing the act is tempted.”⁵³

Was this sexual interpretation of “transformed Nature” in its “unity with Love” inevitable? Marguerite herself never pursued that possibility, and her devout readers took pains to keep it at bay. In fact, her Middle English translator, the Carthusian “M. N.,” glossed the suspect passage as follows: “God forbid that anyone should be so carnal as to think that this could mean giving Nature any pleasure which leads to sins of the flesh. God knows well that that is not how it is meant. … For I say this with truth, that souls who are such as this book describes are so mortified and freed from such miseries, are so illumined with grace and so armed with the love of God, that it extinguishes all fleshly sin in them.”⁵⁴ But the libertine view of Nature certainly had occurred to Jean de Meun. The last major speech in the Rose is delivered by Genius, an ally of Nature and the God of Love, who embodies male reproductive power. This character preaches a provocative “sermon” on the universal duty to procreate, culminating in the injunction to “plow, barons, plow—for God's sake—and renew your lineages!”⁵⁵ The god in question is of course ambiguous, and becomes still more so when Genius goes on to offer some explicitly religious teaching about Paradise.

Such ambiguities were not received kindly by those who viewed themselves as guardians of orthodoxy. In 1277, shortly after the Rose was completed, the faculty of the University of Paris, led by Bishop Etienne Tempier, condemned a long list of “manifest and execrable errors.”⁵⁶ Most of the two hundred nineteen condemned propositions are philosophical doctrines of skeptical or astrological bent, derived from the teachings of Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia. But several are ethical doctrines redolent of the naturalistic discourse Jean had ascribed to Genius: namely that continence is not a virtue, that sexual abstinence corrupts the species, and that simple fornication is not sin.⁵⁷ Although the document does not mention Jean de Meun by name, it does cite and condemn one of his more notorious precursors—Andreas Capellanus and his De amore.⁵⁸ In short, the Paris theologians had already linked a series of disparate and, in their view, dangerous philosophical propositions with “doctrines” they derived from secular writings on love.

In such a context it stands to reason that Marguerite's Mirror, which uses the rhetoric of fine amour even though it has nothing to do with sexual behavior, should have been drawn into the vortex. At one time it was widely held that the Council of Vienne was reacting against the so-called “heresy of the Free Spirit,” a movement that is supposed to have linked antinomian ethics (or lack of ethics) with mystical quietism of the sort that Marguerite taught. Robert Lerner's work has cast doubt on that hypothesis, showing that no identifiable heretic (let alone heretical movement) prior to 1311 can be found to have held such views.⁵⁹ But it remains the case that even if no actual heretics had thought to connect Marguerite's abstruse mysticism with Jean de Meun's sexual naturalism, the fathers at Vienne now did so. In their zeal to defend the faith, they made the Mirror reflect the Rose to a degree that would have astonished its hapless author.

Notes

1. Barbara Newman, “La mystique courtoise: Thirteenth-Century Beguines and the Art of Love,” in From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Literature and Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp. 137-67.

2. Its complete title is Le mirouer des simples ames anienties et qui seulement demourent en vouloir et désir d'amour. I have used the bilingual edition, Le mirouer des simples ames, ed. Romana Guarnieri, with its Latin translation, Speculum simplicium animarum, ed. Paul Verdeyen, CCCM 69 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1986). Translations are my own, but I have consulted those of Edmund Colledge, Jack C. Marler, and Judith Grant, The Mirror of Simple Souls (Notre Dame, 1999), and Ellen Babinsky, The Mirror of Simple Souls (New York: Paulist Press, 1993).

3. “Les traités de Gérard de Liège sur l'amour illicite et sur l'amour de Dieu,” ed. André Wilmart, Analecta reginensia: Extraits des manuscrits latins de la reine Christine conservés au Vatican, Studi e testi 59 (Rome: Vatican, 1933, repr. 1966): 181-247. The text of the Incitamenta appears on 205-47.

4. Septem remedia contra amorem illicitum valde utilia, in ibid., 183-205.

5. See Richard of St. Victor, De quatuor gradibus violentae charitatis, ed. Gervais Dumeige, in Ives: Épître à Séverin sur la charité (Paris:Vrin, 1955); trans. Clare Kirchberger, “Of the Four Degrees of Passionate Charity,” in Richard of Saint-Victor: Selected Writings on Contemplation (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957).

6. Quinque incitamenta 1.5, p. 209. I have printed Gérard's French quotations as verse, though they appear in the edition as prose. Orthography follows Wilmart's edition.

7. Ibid. 3.4, p. 228. Compare Mirouer ch. 21, p. 82: “Amour est Dieu, et Dieu est amour.”

8. Ibid. 3.4.3, p. 232.

9. Ibid. 3.4.3, p. 233.

10. Ibid. 3.2.2, p. 219.

11. “Si autem uiolentiam requirit amor noster, cest con li face force, nullus maiorem uiolentiam pro eo faciet quam ipse. Petit enim eum quasi gladio euaginato. Aut enim eum amabis aut eterna morte morieris. Unde Dauid: Nisi conversi fueritis, ab amore mundi scilicet ad amorem dei, gladium suum vibrabit. Unde hic potest dici quoddam carmen quod uulgo canitur: Tout a force maugre uostre uorsai uostre amour auoir.” Quinque incitamenta 2, p. 211.

12. “Jaloux voirement est il! A ses œuvres l'appert, qui m'ont desrobee de toute moy, et m'ont mise en divine plaisance, sans moy.” Mirouer ch. 71, p. 198.

13. “Sic sine dubio amor siue caritas passio est fortissima, quam nullus sentire et degustare potest quin de necessitate oporteat eum omnes sensus et motus corporeos amittere et etiam motus anime, scilicet scire suum, posse suum et uelle suum, captiuare in obsequium amoris. Hoc enim bene senserat et cognouerat Augustinus, li anguisseus damours, qui dicebat: O potens et prepotens passio caritatis. Iure enim potens, quia animum quem possederit sui ipsius efficit impotentem.” The “Augustine” quotation is actually from Gilbert of Hoyland. Quinque incitamenta 3.3.1, p.223.

14. “Elle a perdu l'usage de ses sens … car Amour l'a ravie du lieu ou elle estoit.” Mirouer ch. 110, p. 300.

15. “On est tenté de croire que ce fut là plutôt chez Gérard une sorte de manie qui n'a fait que grandir, un désir instinctif et bizarre de se distinguer et, tout ensemble, de se distraire au moyen de cet artifice un peu puéril.” André Wilmart, “Gérard de Liège: Un traité inédit de l'amour de Dieu,” Revue d'ascétique et de mystique 12 (1931): 373.

16. Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 1:62.

17. Quinque incitamenta 4.4, p. 246.

18. “La Règle des Fins Amans: Eine Beginenregel aus dem Ende des XIII. Jahrhunderts,” ed. Karl Christ, in Philologische Studien aus dem romanisch-germanischen Kulturkreise: Festschrift Karl Voretzsch, ed. B. Schädel and W. Mulertt (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1927): pp. 173-213. For a fuller analysis of the Règle, see Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, 139-43.

19. Marguerite apparently hailed from Valenciennes, a town on the present-day border between France and Belgium. Her book was burned there in 1306, and Jean Gerson, in an interestingly mixed assessment of the Mirror, named its author mistakenly as “Maria de Valenciennes.” Gerson, “De distinctione verarum revelationum a falsis,” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Palémon Glorieux (Tournai, 1962), 3:51-52. Karl Christ, editor of the Règle des fins amans, assigned it on linguistic grounds to the neighboring province of Picardy.

20. Le Roman de la rose, ed. Daniel Poirion (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1974). Translations are my own, but I have consulted the prose version by Charles Dahlberg, The Romance of the Rose (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), and the verse translation of Harry Robbins, The Romance of the Rose, ed. Charles Dunn (New York: Dutton, 1962).

21. In the final chapters of her book (chs. 123-39), added as a kind of appendix after its initial condemnation in 1306, Marguerite does draw on some of these more traditional genres: exegesis of Gospel passages, hagiography (the legend of Mary Magdalene), and spiritual autobiography (how she herself entered the “Land of Freedom”). This appendix is the only part of the book where Marguerite speaks unambiguously in her own first-person voice.

22. Colledge, Marler, and Grant, “Introductory Interpretative Essay,” Mirror, lxvi-lxix. Relying on the scholarship of past generations, these authors take Jean de Meun to be endorsing, rather than anatomizing or satirizing, the “enslavement by human passion” that typifies “Perfect Love” (lxvii).

23. As Karl D. Uitti points out, se mirer is often mistranslated: It means “to gaze intently,” not necessarily at oneself. “‘Cele [qui] doit ester Rose clamee’ (Rose, vv. 40-44): Guillaume's Intentionality,” in Rethinking the Romance of the Rose: Text, Image, Reception, eds. Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), p. 54.

24. Nature's reconciliation of free will with divine foreknowledge follows Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, but Boethius does not use the mirror image. The speculum providentiae, symbolizing eternal mind, appears as an attribute of Urania in Bernard Silvestris' Cosmographia. In his Anticlaudianus, Alan of Lille gives Reason a triple mirror.

25. On this theme in Marguerite and other beguine mystics, see Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, pp. 153-58.

26. Mirouer ch. 1, p. 12. The last phrase is difficult to translate: Babinsky has “she dreamed of the king,” and Colledge, Marler, and Grant render, “she could imagine that the king himself was present.” The medieval Latin translator evades the problem: “Et mediante tali imagine … semetipsam aliqualiter quietabat.” I follow the literal version of Peter Dronke in Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 219. Songa recalls the famous play on songes/mençonges in the opening couplet of the Rose.

27. Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200-1350) (New York: Crossroad, 1998), p. 247.

28. See ch. 118, describing the sixth and penultimate state of the Free Soul: “Mais ceste Ame, ainsi pure et clariffiee, ne voit ne Dieu ne elle, mais Dieu se voit de luy en elle, pour elle, sans elle.” Mirouer, p. 330.

29. “Et ainsi escripsit ceste mendiant creature ce que vous oez; et voult que ses proesmes trouvassent Dieu en elle, par escrips et par paroles.” Mirouer ch. 96, p. 268.

30. “Si a esté fait par humaine science et humain sens; et humaine raison et humain sens ne scevent rien d'amour denetraine … car tout ce que l'en peut de Dieu dire ne escrire, ne que l'en en peut penser, qui plus est que n'est dire, est assez mieulx mentir que ce n'est vray dire.” Mirouer ch. 119, p. 334.

31. “J'ay dit, dit ceste Ame, que Amour l'a fait escrire par humaine science, et par le vouloir de la mutacion de mon entendement, dont j'estoie encombree, comme il appert par ce livre; car Amour l'a fait, en descombrant mon esperit parmy ces trois dons.” Ibid., emphasis added.

32. Mirouer ch. 3, p. 16.

33. Raison, also grammatically feminine, is never called Dame—presumably because Marguerite regards her as a servant rather than a lady or mistress.

34. See for example ch. 31, pp. 102-3.

35. The same dynamic is at work in German and Dutch lyrics featuring Frau Minne, while the Italian stilnovisti developed alternative tropes to represent the masculine Amore. The French noun amour became masculine only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries under the influence of humanistic Latin, but its plural les amours remains feminine. Walther von Wartburg, Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch 24:469.

36. David Hult, “Language and Dismemberment:Abelard, Origen, and the Romance of the Rose,” in Brownlee and Huot, eds., Rethinking, p. 120.

37. Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot, “Introduction: Rethinking the Rose,” in Rethinking, p. 15; Lori Walters, “Illuminating the Rose: Gui de Mori and the Illustrations of MS 101 of the Municipal Library, Tournai,” in Rethinking, pp. 178-79.

38. C. Stephen Jaeger illumines the dependence of fine amour upon an older practice of passionate male friendship, understood as morally and socially ennobling rather than erotic. Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).

39. Joan Ferrante argues that Bel Acuel has to be male because he “plays the courtly game on the man's terms”: Woman as Image in Medieval Literature from the Twelfth Century to Dante (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), p. 110.

40. “Je suis Dieu, dit Amour, car Amour est Dieu, et Dieu est amour, est ceste Ame est Dieu par condicion d'amour.” Mirouer ch. 21, p. 82.

41. See especially ch. 118, pp. 322-24 (the fourth stage of the Soul), and ch. 133, p. 392. In these two passages Marguerite says that the Soul intoxicated by the sweetness of divine Love is often deceived, imagining wrongly that there is no hiher stage of love than hers, and not realizing that it is herself rather than God that she truly loves. See also Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), ch. 4.

42. “Et fis lors si meller les grenes / Que se desmellassent a penes, / Si que tout le boutonnet tendre / En fis eslargir et estendre.” Roman de la rose, lines 21727-30. Christine calls the conclusion of the Rose “shameful and so very dishonorable … that nobody who loves virtue and honor will hear it without being totally confounded by shame and abomination at hearing described, expressed, and distorted in dishonorable fictions what modesty and reason should restrain well-bred folk from even thinking about.” Letter to Jean de Montreuil, in La Querelle de la Rose: Letters and Documents, ed. and trans. Joseph Baird and John Kane (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), p. 53.

43. Mirouer ch. 122, p. 346.

44. Thus Colledge, Marler, and Grant render the lines unexceptionally: “He is complete, / And from this so am I” (pp. 153-54). But Ellen Babinsky reads, just as plausibly, “He is fullness, / And by this am I impregnated” (p. 201).

45. Mirouer ch. 6, p. 24.

46. “Mais ainçoys les Vertuz font tout ce que telles Ames veullent, sans danger et sans contredit, car telles Ames sont leurs maistresses.” Mirouer ch. 8, p. 30.

47. Roman de la rose, lines 5388-404. Among the departed Virtues are Right, Chastity, Faith, and Justice.

48. The plucking of the Rose is not technically rape, since Bel Acuel has freely granted it to the Lover (lines 21340-5). But the sex scene that follows emphasizes the Lover's violent and selfish pleasure, while Bel Acuel protests that he is “trop outrageus” (21739). See Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), pp. 68-71; Leslie Cahoon, “Raping the Rose: Jean de Meun's Reading of Ovid's Amores,” Classical and Modern Literature 6 (1986): 261-85.

49. This was the stance of Christine de Pizan's adversaries (Jean de Montreuil, Pierre and Gontier Col) in the querelle de la Rose. More recently it has been argued by Joan Ferrante, Woman as Image, pp. 111-17, and John Fleming, Reason and the Lover (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), among many others.

50. Colledge, Marler, and Grant, Mirror, pp. xliv-xlv; McGinn, Flowering, p. 245; Robert Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 75-76. For the complete trial records, see Paul Verdeyen, “Le procès d'inquisition contre Marguerite Porete et Guiard de Cressonessart (1309-1310),” Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique 81 (1986): 48-94.

51. “Quod se in actibus exercere virtutum est hominis imperfecti, et perfecta anima licentiat a se virtutes.” Errores Beguardorum et Beguinarum de statu perfectionis, Constitutio “Ad nostrum” (May 6, 1312), article 6. Henricus Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum, definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, 33rd ed. (Freiburg: Herder, 1965), p. 282.

52. “[Laquelle Ame] donne a Nature tout ce qu'il luy fault, sans remors de conscience; mais telle nature est si bien ordonnee par transformacion de unité d'Amour … que la nature ne demande chose qui soit deffendue.” Mirouer ch. 9, p. 32. Cf. Colledge, Marler and Grant, Mirror, p. xlv.

53. “Quod mulieris osculum, cum ad hoc natura non inclinet, est mortale peccatum; actus autem carnalis, cum ad hoc natura inclinet, peccatum non est, maxime cum tentatur exercens.” “Ad nostrum,” article 7; Denzinger, Enchiridion, p. 282.

54. Appendix 2 in Colledge, Marler, and Grant, Mirror, p. 187. On this translation, see Nicholas Watson, “Melting into God the English Way: Deification in the Middle English Version of Marguerite Porete's Mirouer des simples âmes anienties,” in Rosalynn Voaden, ed., Prophets Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Late-Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), pp. 19-49.

55. “Arés, por Dieu, baron, arés, / Et vos linages reparés.” Roman de la rose, lines 19701-2.

56. Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, vol. 1, no. 473, ad 1277, ed. Henri Denifle (Paris: Delalain, 1889), pp. 543-55.

57. These are propositions no. 168 (“Quod continentia non est essentialiter virtus”), 169 (“Quod perfecta abstinentia ab actu carnis corrumpit virtutem et speciem”), and 183 (“Quod simplex fornicatio, utpote soluti cum soluta, non est peccatum”). Ibid., p. 553.

58. “Librum etiam ‘De amore,’ sive ‘De Deo amoris,’ qui sic incipit: Cogit me multum, etc. et sic terminatur: Cave igitur, Galtere … per eandem sententiam nostram condempnamus.” Ibid., p. 543.

59. Lerner, Heresy of the Free Spirit, especially pp. 78-84.