SOURCE: Colledge, Edmund, J. C. Marler, and Judith Grant. “Introductory Interpretive Essay.” In The Mirror of Simple Souls, by Margaret Porete, translated by Edmund Colledge, J. C. Marler, and Judith Grant, pp. xxxv-lxxxvii. South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999.

[In the following excerpt, Colledge, Marler, and Grant discuss Porete's The Mirror of Simple Souls within its historical, literary, and critical contexts, also addressing the interpretive questions it raises, its theological arguments, and its influence.]

[The Mirror of Simple Souls's] structure is that of a Boethian dialogue. The principal interlocutor is the Soul, or, sometimes, Love, who speaks for the Soul; and they engage in expounding their doctrine of the supremacy of Love to a variety of personages, among whom Reason appears most often.

At times Love is given her true name, by which the courtly poets call her, “Perfect Love,” Fine amor; and we have written¹ that this name signifies “what has none of the baseness of the conduct of peasants …,” quoting Professor Cropp: “Fin amour carefully preserves the notion of what is superlative, perfected. Loyalty, authenticity, refinement are all names which become attached to it.” We are told² that souls become free “once Love dwells in them”; and, finally, Love says: “I am God, for Love is God and God is Love.”³

From even this partial account of ‘Love’ as personification, we can see how justly Margaret had appreciated the insights of her precursors, how deftly she had been able to adapt in this one character two differing views of life, seemingly hostile, yet amenable to such reconciliation. We can, however, also discern in what has been cited here of her account of who is ‘Far-Near’ and how he works, her love of hyperbole and her employment of riddling language. Edmund Colledge and Romana Guarnieri have suggested that her motive in this was to conceal her true opinions from inimical critics;⁴ but Robert Lerner thought this unjust, since he considers that such duplicity would be foreign to the personality which he esteems in the Mirror's author.⁵ One can only offer such conflicts of opinion to readers for their own judgments; but it is fact that in many places the book is very hard to understand, and that at times Margaret admits that it is her wish that this should be so. In Chapter 17, after she has announced her celebrated scandalum, “This Soul gives to Nature whatever she asks of her,” Love remarks: “But such creatures are so excellent that one dares not openly talk of this, especially of their customs, which give them a state of being where they understand as should be understood; but there are few who taste such understanding. … One dares never openly speak of them … for other creatures understand in so crude a way that they would misunderstand, and to their harm.”⁶ A little later, when Reason—made, as often, to seem a dullard—complains about the difficulty of following Love's expositions, her adversary observes: “One and the same word has two meanings.”⁷ In effect, Margaret seems to be saying here, in the person of Love, that she is using her considerable literary abilities to discomfit Reason with ambiguities and enigmas.

That Reason is at once Love's adversary and her inferior is one of the most frequently recurring topics in the debate. In Chapter 9 she is called “Reason, who understands only the obvious and fails to grasp what is subtle”;⁸ and in Chapter 12 this is put more picturesquely and disparagingly, when the Soul says to Reason's Understanding: “You take the straw and leave the grain, because your understanding is too base.”⁹ In Chapter 13 Reason is made to say disarmingly: “No-one who understands as I do will understand this book, unless he understands it by the strength of Faith and the power of Love, who are my mistresses, for I obey them in all things”;¹⁰ and in Chapter 53 the Soul complains that it is Reason's incomprehension which has “shamed and spoiled this book,” making it longer than it need have been, “for the sake of you and those whom you have nourished, who go at a snail's pace.”¹¹

None of this dispraise of Reason, however, should be understood as any claim on behalf of her antagonists for intellectual superiority. The Soul is certainly the superior, but through Faith and Love. Consistently, a scorn for scholarship is displayed. Readers are warned in the second stanza of the verse prologue that “Men of theology and such as they / Will never understand this writing properly.”¹² Chapter 9 shows Love telling Reason that “every teacher of natural wisdom, every teacher of book-learning” will lack the understanding of liberated souls, which will be given only to “him who seeks after Perfect Love”;¹³ and Love goes on: “This Soul is learning in the school of Divine Knowledge.”¹⁴

The foregoing should still not be interpreted as our imputation to Margaret of any lack of the intellectual gifts which she affects to despise. She shows herself to be a not incompetent amateur theologian. In one place we have remarked that she “is familiar with ‘fruition’ and with its precise theological meaning” (which is more than can be said for many writers of modern English), and elsewhere that she “can distinguish between ‘true’ and ‘false deification’.”¹⁵ In Chapter 35 we say that in our opinion she is “safeguarding herself with considerable skill against suspicion that she is teaching ‘pre-existentianism’.”¹⁶ We have commented on one passage in which she shows herself “acquainted with the terminology of moral theology.”¹⁷ Throughout, we have indicated places in the Mirror reminiscent of Western spiritual classics, and others which show Margaret's evident familiarity with the Scriptures.

In 1274 the Franciscan Gilbert of Tournai presented a report to the Council of Lyons on the state of the Church. In it he complained of the Beguines' taste for theological subtilitates and novitates, and about their reading of French Bibles, which they expounded “in conventicles, in nooks and corners and in the streets.”¹⁸ Though we have already intimated that we are not wholly convinced that Margaret was a ‘Beguine’ in a juridical sense, still it is very evident that she was such a woman as Gilbert was deploring.

Through all her book there runs the theme of her consciousness that she has been called to help in the salvation of her fellows by teaching them that their souls belong to Love alone. In Chapter 17, Divine Justice says: “If she withheld from her neighbors what they need, she would withhold what is not her own.”¹⁹ In the previous chapter, Love has said that the liberated Soul would help other believers with all her might, but not so as to disturb her own peace,²⁰ evidently Margaret's own solution of the puzzling evangelicum dictum, “Mary has chosen the best part,”²¹ which seems to extol the contemplative life at the expense of actives. Chapter 71 elaborates this: Love says that “This Soul no longer performs any works for God, or for herself, or for her neighbors either,”²² which seems to be advocacy of a total passivity, except that it carries the rider: “unless God, who can perform them, does this if it is his will.”

This is the conclusion of very many who have taught ‘hesychasm’, ‘quietism’, ‘inactivity for the love of God’. In the Mirror's Chapter 45, after the Soul has expounded with great lucidity and authority the godhead's incomprehensibility, she is made to ask: “O Lord God, what shall the Soul do who believes this of you?” to which God replies: “She shall do nothing, but I shall do my work in her without her;” and then God goes on to explain that self-knowledge and faith in his divinity have brought the Soul to annihilation.²³ Near the end, in Chapter 136, “How every work is forbidden to the Soul brought to Nothing,” the theme is resumed with such paradoxes as: “Then [the Soul] does not pray, not even as little as she did before she had being,” and “she has nothing with which she could do good.” To understand such assertions, we must keep in mind the traditions of spiritual literature to which Margaret was appealing when she called her book Le Mirouer des simples ames anienties, “The Mirror of Simple Souls Brought to Nothing” (the authenticity of the title is vouched for in Chapter 13).²⁴ We do not challenge Robert Lerner's judgment … that in her hesychasm there may be dubious theology, but, in extenuation, we suggest that some of her extravagances become more acceptable if we keep in mind—though her discursive treatment and her strange terminology do not make this easy—that the liberated soul is annihilated, “brought to nothing,” and has lost every one of her own characteristics, so that she can no longer perceive any difference between God and herself. One should insist that this is not ‘false deification’; in this deified state the soul is nothing, possesses nothing, because it is God who is and possesses and acts in her, not the Soul herself. This is the liberty of the deified soul, who “seeks no more for God; she has not the means, and she has no business with God. She does not lack him, so why should she seek him?”²⁵ This could be from Meister Eckhart's own pen; and addiction to language so provocative beyond doubt contributed to her downfall as it did to Eckhart's adversities. Such a soul “has no business with God,” for in union with him it is not she who works but God in her; and “she has not the means,” for her knowledge of God is immediate. Already in Chapter 5 Love has said: “This Soul has six wings, just as the Seraphim. She no longer wishes for anything which comes by an intermediary, for that is the proper state of being of the Seraphim; there is no intermediary between their love and God's love.”²⁶

When the Mirror tells us that purified, liberated, annihilated souls do not pray, do no good, perform no works, Margaret was putting herself further in jeopardy, because her enemies could with justice point to other places in her book where she shows herself hostile to the Church, her sacraments and her institutions, and could then maintain that this was also shown by her advocacy of hesychasm.

Though Edmund Colledge is no longer so satisfied as he was in 1968, when he and Romana Guarnieri published “The Glosses by ‘M.N.’ and Richard Methley,” that the Mirror's pronouncements about ‘Holy Church the Less’ are clear evidence of Margaret's adherence to the tenets of ‘Valentinian gnosticism’, even so she makes it plain that in her view there are two ‘Churches’. In Chapter 18 the Soul, attempting the impossible, to describe divine ineffability, launches into a sequence of brilliant paradoxes; but in the next chapter Faith, Hope, and Charity protest that the book is seeking to confuse its ‘auditors’ (one of numerous indications that the Mirror was intended for reading aloud), and they add in warning: “For all Holy Church, if she were to hear it read, would be dismayed by it,” to which Love trenchantly retorts: “Truly, this is Holy Church the Less, who is ruled by Reason, and not Holy Church the Greater, who is ruled by us.”²⁷ We have previously described how often Reason is disparaged and represented as subject to Love; and no room is left for questioning that Margaret's ‘Holy Church the Less’ is the Roman Church, and that Love's declaration that it is she who is the head of ‘Holy Church the Greater’ is Margaret's refusal of obedience to the Holy See, and, indeed, to any other ‘Church’.

Readers who may consult Kurt Ruh's chapter “Meister Eckhart and Beguine Spirituality”²⁸ should be aware that he has confused and transposed the two ‘Churches’, evidently not appreciating the contempt which Margaret has for ‘the Less’. Surprisingly, Huot de Longchamp falls into the same error. …

Margaret seems to hold the ministrations of this ‘Church’ in equally low esteem, though in this matter—as in others—the Mirror is not wholly consistent. Chapter 15 (“This Speaks of the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar”) has one passage which also seems to go out of its way to give scandal to the orthodox, when Light of Faith says: “Take this sacrament, put it in a mortar with other substances, and pound it. …”²⁹ This may have occasioned John of Meuse's statement that Margaret wrote disrespectfully about the Mass,³⁰ but it is hard to disagree with the opinion of Richard Methley, the late fifteenth-century English Carthusian who glossed the Mirror,³¹ that no disrespect was intended. Yet how are we to reconcile this harmless and otherwise edifying discussion of the Eucharist with the provocative statement in Chapter 9, quoted and condemned, as we have seen, at the Paris trial: “This Soul neither longs for nor despises poverty or tribulation, Mass or sermon …”?³² The C scribe has a marginal note referring readers to Chapter 13 for an explanation. There Reason does ask Love for this; but although Love praises—exceptionally—Reason's perspicacity, and promises to answer all her questions, she avoids commenting on Reason's remark: “my understanding and my intelligence and all my advice … tell me that one should long for contempt, poverty and every kind of tribulation, and Masses and sermons and fastings and prayers. …”³³ Love contents herself with the general observation: “the Soul set Free has no will at all to will or not to will, except only to will the will of God,”³⁴ although this conflicts with what is taught in Chapter 48 on ‘Poverty of the Will’.³⁵ M.N. makes use of Chapter 13, but provides his own explanation,³⁶ which is plausible, but would be more convincing, one may think, if Margaret had offered it in Love's answers to Reason's questions.

In fine, Margaret foresaw that she would incur the Church's hostility for the book which she was composing, but she was not deflected from her object, the exposition of her beliefs about the life of grace, her own ‘counsels of perfection’. She was no friend of ‘Holy Church the Less’, or of the Church's institutions, including the religious orders and, we saw, the Beguines themselves. She took pride in the singularity of her doctrine and found pleasure in knowing how few there were who would understand and accept it. However much we may today abhor the Inquisition and its methods, she seems to have ensured that she would fall its victim.

In several places we have compared her teachings and her personal history—so far as any of that is known—with Meister Eckhart's; and Edmund Colledge and J. C. Marler have produced one instance in which, they consider, Eckhart can be shown to have adopted one of her tenets, that concerning ‘Poverty of the Will’—that it is not perfect ‘poverty of the will’ for the soul to will even that God's will be done—a hesychastic proposition so extreme that it is not known to be advanced anywhere except in the Mirror's Chapter 48 and in Eckhart's Beati pauperes spiritu. Kurt Ruh has expressed himself as unconvinced by this;³⁷ but since he began his Mirror researches with the conviction, which Josef Koch had shared,³⁸ that Eckhart had read the Mirror, one may suspect that he might have been more convinced by this confirmation of his opinions had he discovered the evidence which supports them. In his own discussion of the matter, he accepts an oversimplified view of mediaeval spirituality, as when he writes: “These new orders”—that is, the mendicants—“unlike the older ones, were mobile, preaching penitence and the imitation of Christ, and no longer lived in the financial security provided by monastery walls;”³⁹ and such a view accounts in part for his belief that resemblances between the Mirror and Eckhart's teachings—for instance, on ‘self-abandonment’—point to borrowing, whereas such doctrine, as also that on ‘penitence and the imitation of Christ’, are commonplaces.

We do not, however, wish to ignore the many merits of Ruh's Meister Eckhart. He possesses an enviable mastery of late mediaeval German vernacular spiritual writings; and he argues with great probability that Eckhart, after completing his second teaching assignment in Paris, was sent by his order to Strasbourg not, as has often been suggested, to supervise their house of theological studies for young men, but rather to be in charge of the cura monialum, the ‘care of nuns’, the spiritual direction of the many South German Dominican women's convents. He then draws upon numerous surviving documents, notably The Life of the Servant, attributed by the editors to Henry Suso (though the attribution is still hotly disputed). Then Ruh writes vividly of the spiritual atmosphere in such houses, over-enthusiastic, uncritical, credulous, neurotic; and he suggests⁴⁰ that Eckhart was not attracted by what he found as he visited the nuns, that “he questioned the validity of their standards and experiences.” His examination of this topic begins with a shrewd assessment of Eckhart's Rede der Unterscheidung, “Instructional Talks,” as he would now have us understand this title; and he proceeds to show how little of the nuns' religious enthusiasm is evident in the ‘ways’ (Eckhart's usual term for forms of spiritual living, which we may equate with Margaret's usages, ‘customs’, except that Eckhart's ‘ways’ is unambiguous, carrying no esoteric implications) which he had sought to encourage in his young pupils when he had served as prior at Erfurt.

It has already been observed that certain characteristics of Beguine literature are notably absent from the Mirror. Similarly, it shows few of the marks which usually distinguish the treatises that Rhineland nuns wrote with such assiduity. Ruh describes what these were.⁴¹ Of ‘inwardness’, ‘interiority’ there is evidence, though Margaret tends to treat it rather as an alienation of the soul from the world towards God. Of ‘devotion’, as Eckhart's nuns understood the term, there is little witness. In Chapter 7 Love says: “This Soul is no longer able to speak of God, for she has been brought to nothing in all her external longings and inward feelings and all affections of the spirit, so that whatever this Soul does, she does it because it is some accustomed commendable practice”—surely lukewarm praise—“or because Holy Church commands it”—‘Holy Church the Less’, we need not doubt—“but not through any longing of her own.”⁴²

Of Ruh's third symptom of Rhineland ‘enthusiasm’, ‘jubilation’, the Mirror has little to show. When in Chapter 77 Margaret writes of “that gift which never was given, which never was spoken by mouth or thought in heart …,”⁴³ this may be a reminiscence of the Jubilus, the anonymous hymn long falsely attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux,⁴⁴ but of ‘jubilation’ itself, that spontaneous ecstatic outpouring of prayer and praise of which so many spiritual writers have treated, calling it a gift of the Holy Spirit, one finds no trace in her book. However, of Ruh's other manifestation of ‘enthusiasm’, the proclamation of the transports of the ‘annihilated soul’, the Mirror, as we have seen, is full.

We have observed how William of Paris's intention, that every last trace of Margaret's book should be destroyed, was frustrated. It continued to be copied and quoted in circles where its merits evidently were highly esteemed. One of Dr. Guarnieri's most interesting cases (though she concedes that its details are far from clear) concerns the Gesuati, the devotional confraternities founded about 1366 by Blessed John Colombini, and their involvement with the Mirror. Twice their practices had been investigated on papal authority, and on either occasion the substance of the complaints made against them seems to have been their persistent use of the book as pious reading during their exercises. It should be added that the Italian translations, though no less defective than other versions, give spirited renderings of the dialogues, which the Gesuati no doubt appreciated.

It was because of their promotion of the Mirror that interest in it and discussion of its teachings revived as the Council of Basel proceeded; and in MS Vat. lat. 4953 we have what seems to be the only text (fols. 29^r-32^r) of the notes and citations offered to the Council by a faction who were seeking for the Mirror's condemnation. We shall presently examine this faction's motives; yet it could have spared itself labor by reference to the 1310 Paris process. It appears that the passage of a century and more had obliterated all knowledge that the book had already been pronounced heretical.

There is no proof for Romana Guarnieri's assertion⁴⁵ that this manuscript is the very document presented to the Council in protest against the conduct of “Gabriel Condulmaro,” probable though this may seem. No other copy of it is known, and the Vatican codex presents the Mirror quotations as thirty separate propositions, as “James the Hermit” says that he has done in his protest, already before the fathers. This is part of the strange story told by John of Segovia, one of the leading supporters at Basel of the theory that the authority of the General Council of the Church is superior to that of the Pope.

John's account, as edited by Ernst Bok, is that in 1439, on 22 July (the feast of St. Mary Magdalene, when the Council was not in session) one James of [] (Bok could not decipher the proper name, which is surely immaterial) appeared at the president's house before the conciliar steering committee. He was a master in arts and medicine, but he was dressed as a hermit, in dirty, coarse, ragged clothing. He reminded the delegates that he had already written to the Procurator of the Faith, asking the Council to take note of thirty articles containing false doctrine, “which had been extracted from ‘the Book of Simple Souls’ which ‘Gabriel Condulmaro’ had favored.”

Gabriel Condulmaro was the son of a powerful Venetian family, who at the age of twenty-five was made cardinal-priest of San Clemente by his uncle, Gregory XII. In 1431 he was elected pope, as Eugene IV, and at once dismissed the Council of Basel. The Council, however, refused to cooperate, and revived the Gallican theory of conciliar supremacy.

It is clear that John of Segovia's Historia relates the story of Condulmaro and the Mirror in order to discredit Pope Eugene by suggesting that he could be suspected of heretical leanings. He was not the first pontiff to have been the object of such manoeuvres. William of Ockham, a century before, had been summoned to Avignon and was awaiting judgment on his theological writings at the same time as Eckhart; and after he had fled the city and sought the protection of Pope John XXII's arch-enemy, Emperor Louis the Bavarian, he attempted in his dialogue On the Power of the Pope and of the Clergy to represent John as suspect by offering a mendacious account of his dealings with Eckhart.⁴⁶

Had either William of Ockham or John of Segovia succeeded in these attempts, then a general council, it was held, could deprive a heretical pope of his office. The great decretalist Huguccio, writing in the late twelfth century, had ruled that “the cardinals can depose a pope for heresy; yet they are not greater than the pope;”⁴⁷ and the only dissent from the opinion which Brian Tierney quotes is that of Guy de Baysio, writing a century later and laying it down that this deposing power could be exercised only by a general council.⁴⁸

We must allow for the possibility that the hermit is John's invention, as is much of the rest of the story, which grows wilder as it continues. He treats Eugene's deposition as if it were accomplished fact; and he states that thereafter Eugene had secretly appointed three bishops, one the Venetian prelate, to pass judgment on the Mirror, but that they without any warning had delivered to prison many of the faithful who had taken action against those who had persisted in the errors taught in the book. Evidently the hermit considered himself threatened; but when his kinsmen and neighbors had entreated the bishops to grant him a safe-conduct, so that he might explain his actions to them, this was refused. Lest those in prison should perish, ‘James’ entered by stealth, a hair shirt over his bare body and his feet unshod, and not without great danger led them out through the open doors by torchlight. John adds that ‘James’ had told the Basel delegates many other things about Eugene's patronage of the Mirror and its supporters for which he should be judged a heretic.

As we have suggested, we suspect that ‘James the Hermit’ is John of Segovia's invention, to provide a picturesque mise-en-scène for the propositions extracted from Margaret's book. Much of the story is beyond question fictitious: how the hermit rescued hapless captives from prison by night is no more than an adaption of Acts, chapters 5 and 12, such as any competent mediaeval exegete could have produced. Had the Council's steering committee thought that these charges against the pope were of sufficient substance to merit investigation, they might either have appointed a sub-committee to make enquiries or have referred the Mirror extracts and ‘James's’ charges to a plenary Council session; but there is no indication in the day-by-day records of transacted conciliar business that either course was followed.⁴⁹

Though the case of Eugene's opponents rested upon the book's heretical character, which had been solemnly pronounced at the time of Margaret's trial, all memory of that was now forgotten, and, as in Margaret's own day, so in succeeding epochs her work continued to be studied as a well-constructed and fruitful spiritual treatise. Testimony to this is found in the compositions of Margaret of Angoulême (1492-1539), queen of Navarre and elder sister of Francis I of France. She was a woman of intellectual distinction, who maintained a brilliant circle of artists and scholars at her court. She showed herself deeply sympathetic to the ‘enlightenment’ of her age, and to its growing freedom of thought, which she welcomed in defiance of the disapproval of orthodox churchmen. One of her early prose works, The Mirror of the Sinful Soul, was censured by the Sorbonne in 1533 as theologically reprehensible; but seemingly the Sorbonne's writ did not run in the kingdom of Navarre. Romana Guarnieri has described the protection which the queen gave to the tailor Quintin and his confederates among the ‘Spiritual Libertinists’, rebels against church authority who had become wanted men.⁵⁰ According to the sources which she quotes, they were unsavory types, although we may find it strange that she, who did so much to rescue Margaret Porette's name from the ill-informed, third-hand stories and prejudiced polemic which had sullied it, did not perceive that the kind of testimony brought against the Mirror of the Sinful Soul's authoress, which the queen had rejected, was of the same nature as the information (not excluding the interventions of Bucer and Calvin) which Dr. Guarnieri used without questioning to describe for us the ‘libertinists’ and the evil ends to which they were said to have come.

In considering Margaret of Navarre's character and influence, one will probably do well to ignore such information. We know that she extended the benevolent patronage towards devout religious houses which was expected of ladies of her station. Il Movimento prints, from a manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale, a letter of April 1529 from her brother the French king to an official in the diocese of Orléans acting as his agent, directing that the taxes due to the crown from the convent of sisters of the Reform of Fontevrault, the Madeleine at Orléans, be remitted, and that in return the nuns should pray “for us, the health and wellbeing of our children, the peace of our realm, and also for the benefit of our very dear and beloved only sister, the Queen of Navarre, who urgently requested and prayed us to do this.”⁵¹ It is therefore of interest that C, the Chantilly Condé manuscript from which our translation has been made, contains (fol. 1) inscriptions recording that at one time it was in the possession of the Madeleine. There is no evidence, but merely an inaccurate statement by L. H. Cottineau, to support Kurt Ruh's assertion⁵² that the Orléans nuns were the manuscript's first owners; nor can we affirm that it was from this copy that Queen Margaret became acquainted with The Mirror of Simple Souls. Yet we know of her veneration for its author (whom she does not name, though she is aware that this was a woman) and of her enthusiasm for its teachings from the queen's poems, collected and published as Les Prisons.⁵³ In one she had written:

Gentle Far-Near! and how fair is this name!
He has the power to raise the dead
Out of their tombs, for when Far-Near appears
Not death nor hell can hold the sinner fast.
Gentle Far-Near! The soul that calls on you
By this your name, for my choice, better speaks
Than all the teachers who have labored long
In study: for I was amazed
At how the spirit of a maid so lowly
Was filled so full with grace from God.(54)

Perhaps we can see in Margaret of Angoulême's praise of Far-Near a certain nostalgia for the chivalric age which by her time had disappeared, which even in Margaret Porette's days was on the wane, but which, The Mirror of Simple Souls plainly shows, had for its author a strong appeal, as a literary mode and a way of life. How little we know of her personal history has already been stressed; but her book shows beyond any doubt that she was an educated woman. There is no solid evidence that she knew any language or literature other than French; but for her purposes these resources appear to have been adequate. She testifies to such familiarity with the Scriptures (greater than Romana Guarnieri in her edition discerned) as we expect of cultivated laymen or laywomen of the Middle Ages; and we know that France was as well furnished with Bible translations as any other neighboring country in Western Europe.⁵⁵ There are many other classical French texts with which she seems also to have been well acquainted, notably The Romance of the Rose, as has been noted, and Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy.

To mention Boethius at the same time as John of Meun is, in mediaeval French studies, no unnatural conjunction. When John, towards the end of the thirteenth century, was at work on his completion of William of Lorris's unfinished Romance, it seems that he was contemplating a new vernacular version of the Consolation, one, we are informed, of thirteen or fourteen different French Boethius translations made before the year 1500.⁵⁶ In the Mirror, the personifications, the expostulations, the philosophical demonstrations made through question and answer all put us in mind of the Consolation and of the Romance alike; yet one must begin by conceding important differences between Boethius' work, John's, and Margaret Porette's. In her book Love represents the Soul's servitude to Reason and the Virtues as ‘Lordship’, as the bondage of tyranny, and says that the Soul will become free when she has thrown this off.⁵⁷ This is a subtle reversal of what we find in the Romance. There, John of Meun makes Reason denounce ‘Lordship’, which constantly renews its servants' torments, plunging them each day into fresh miseries, exposing their folly when first they took oaths of fealty.

In the Mirror, Reason is the Soul's enemy, at war with her as she strives to attain the object of her love. Margaret, for all the allure which the Romance must have held for her, had diagnosed John's acceptance of what has been called “the heresy of courtly love.”⁵⁸ However much she may have been attracted to that “ideal universe which villeins were forbidden to understand or to approach,”⁵⁹ she saw that John's philosophy was incompatible with the realities of Christian morality, that although the ‘Love’ of her Mirror and of the Romance may bear the same name, they represent irreconcilables, the enslavement by human passion which the poets of ‘Perfect Love’ exalted, and the Soul's abandonment of its own will for the sake of the divine will which is one of the Mirror's dominant topics. Reason becomes an enemy in the Romance because he shows earthly lovers for the fools they are, in the Mirror because Reason's dictates would make the Soul cling to her own will.

Margaret's philosophy is completely different from what the first troubadours proclaimed as the principles of ‘Perfect Love’, principles which, one suspects, many of the Romance's mediaeval readers, beguiled by its outward trappings, the forms and conventions of chivalric literature, believed that William of Lorris and John of Meun were still celebrating. (Yet we should notice, for what that is worth, that the ‘Retractation’ attributed to Chaucer at the end of The Parson's Tale does not include his translation of the Romance with Troilus and Criseyde among the “worldly vanities” which he repented.)⁶⁰ Margaret, however, may well have discerned a deeper spiritual significance in the lover's search for the rosa mystica, even in the unfinished form in which William left it. Jacques Ribard⁶¹ has presented us with a persuasive interpretation of William's conclusion, with ‘Sweet Speaking’ (Bel Accueil) and the Rose imprisoned in the round tower enclosed within the walled square; and he has written that this represents “those barriers accumulated through the centuries by human nature, incapable by its own power of raising itself to the heights of knowledge and of love. The quest has been ended, and the poem closes with the lamentation of the rejected lover, driven, one may say, into outer darkness. For here on this earth it is man's lot never to cease to search for God, without ever attaining him in his incomprehensible transcendence.” The Rose is a Far-Near; and both symbolize doctrines of man's necessary submission to divine omnipotence which the poets of Perfect Love in twelfth-century Provence would not have recognized or accepted.

So it is very natural that Margaret should have expressed her thought in the Mirror by the themes and images of a Christianized Perfect Love. By no means does one wish to imply that this attraction to the ‘courtly’ elements in the Romance indicates that anyone so drawn may have been of aristocratic birth or upbringing. Two critical studies are here much to the point. R. F. Green has provided a detailed and engrossing examination of the part played in the great households of the late Middle Ages by so-called court poets;⁶² but from his presentation we are obliged to conclude that rulers and their entourages seldom had more than a perfunctory interest in Perfect Love as a way of life. It is true that John Gerson and Christine “of Pizan,” though quite differently motivated, took the Romance seriously as a work of fiction which could and did influence men's actions; but courtiers seem to have been rare among those who were so swayed. Yet it has always been true of literary fashion that it surmounts class barriers, authors borrowing what was characteristic of one social level for the diversion of audiences who may not have been of the same standing. An obvious example is the popularity of the pastourelle, artless-seeming songs about the lives of shepherds and shepherdesses; and A. T. Hatto has put forward the opinion⁶³ that Neidhardt of Reuental was composing songs treating of peasants and their customs which he destined for performance to noble hearers. Elsewhere Hatto observes⁶⁴ that in Piers Plowman B i 154, when its author (surely one of the most ascetic of all mediaeval poets and least susceptible to what was modish) writes “Never was there leaf upon the linden tree …,” he is using imagery traditional in secular, amorous verse to speak of the love of God.

In the same way, Margaret peoples her scene with one character after another whom we can find in the Romance or works of its kind, ‘Lordship’, ‘Perfect Love’, ‘Pure Graciousness’, ‘Jealous Lover’; and she puts into their mouths the fashionable talk of the times: “Whoever was to love well would have no thought of receiving, but would rather always to give,”⁶⁵ “I know that I can have no greater joy or honor than to be the slave of such a lady,”⁶⁶ “O most highly born,” says Love to this precious pearl, “you have indeed entered into that one free dwelling place where no-one enters if he is not of your kind and of no base birth.”⁶⁷ Jean Orcibal has attempted⁶⁸ to relate such sentiments in the Mirror, which he calls “enfranchisement by annihilation,” to “an epoch stained with the blood of incessant uprisings of commons against the lords,” and he has further suggested (frivolously, one may consider) that Margaret's verses, “Once I was shut up in prison's bondage / To which Longing bound me as I willed what affection asked,”⁶⁹ may allude to “her first conflicts with ecclesiastical authority,” so that he is then encouraged to write that they “announce from far off the ‘Dark Night’ of St. John of the Cross.” Had Margaret suffered imprisonment because of her writings, as John of the Cross did, before her arrest and bringing to prison in Paris, William would certainly have reproached her with that; and where in the Mirror (apart from Clare Kirchberger's unhappy appraisal of M.N.'s ‘Far Night’) Orcibal could find language reminiscent of John of the Cross, he does not say.

If there is much in the Mirror of the Romance's language and thought, it reminds us through its construction quite as strongly of Boethius' Consolation. F. P. Pickering has surveyed that work's vast and pervasive authority throughout the literature of the Middle Ages,⁷⁰ and it must have been one of the classics most often translated into European vernacular languages, not least, as we have seen, in France. Extensive though Pickering's enquiries have been, one topic to which, surprisingly, they were not directed is the Romance; yet it is from that work that Margaret may have acquired her ‘Boethianism’. Perhaps it was John of Meun who introduced her to the genre of the dialogue of consolation, founded in the Christian West by Boethius, which the Mirror in its turn represents. As Margaret uses dialogue for debate, remonstration, lament, she seems to have been influenced, whether directly or not, by the Consolation; but as she unfolds her demonstrations of the inexorable demands upon the soul of the love of God, her dramatis personae, one has seen, and her inspiration are drawn from the Romance, from which her own literary abilities would well enable her to extract the hidden, spiritual sense. John Molinet seems to have been the first to write a “moralized Romance,” which was published at Lyons four years before his death in 1507; and he maintains that the work is capable of interpretation in an exclusively Christian sense. It is difficult today to read this with much sympathy. When, for instance, he tells us that the carbuncle, gleaming and glittering in the fountain of the Garden of Love, symbolizes the body of the Lord in the consecrated host, we may regard this as an imposture of no great ingenuity. But Marc-René Jung's history of recent Romance studies⁷¹ shows how often perception of the truly Christian sense to be discerned in John's work, which Margaret seems to have achieved, has suggested itself to later critics, though this has been advanced with varying degrees of probability. Jung is not the only modern scholar to have considered D. W. Robertson one-sided.

We have already remarked that Margaret deliberately cultivated the delphic manner which exposed her book to misrepresentation; but that can be remedied by close reference to her text. Orcibal's attempt to find in it early intimations of economic determinism and class warfare is no more than half-hearted; and the same must be said of his claims for her as a ‘mystic’.

The current fashion, not yet on the wane, is to overlay the records of the conflicts through which mediaeval society evolved with a socialist interpretation. Hence, James Fournier, whom we have seen championing the principles of objectivity and scholarship in his task of scrutinizing the writings of authors such as Meister Eckhart, has been represented as defending his Church's exploitation of the oppressed poor;⁷² and, more recently, Eckhart himself has been displayed to us as a fourteenth-century prophet of Engels and Marx.⁷³ This is the “newe guise.” Alexander Murray has wittily observed: “Two chief notions have been staunchly upheld … all the more staunchly for being largely incompatible. One is that the mediaeval poor (meaning primarily the peasantry) were models of piety. … The other notion is that all the mediaeval poor were in more or less chronic conflict with the ruling classes, and hence disagreed with them, in various measures of radicalism, about religion.”⁷⁴The Mirror of Simple Souls could, only too easily, be manipulated to serve as material for the ‘economic interpretation of history’. Yet to do this would be to ignore or to falsify Margaret's true aims, just as would any attempt to represent her as a hapless female, victimized by a society and a Church founded by men and organized for the exclusive benefit of men. One can scarcely hope to forestall such attempts; but they would be largely specious. Without doubt, the Mirror is a document of protest; but it does not protest against the social order which shaped the author. She shows herself largely unaware of that order and indifferent to it. Rather, she is deploring, as John of Meun and Boethius in their times had done, the wilfulness and perversity of human nature, its blindness as it stumbles and strays away from the goals which God created it to attain. Even so, this does not make Margaret a ‘mystic’, as some modern critics are claiming.

In contrast to Orcibal's approach, which seems to us tendentious, one must welcome the more moderate and objective approach of Peter Dronke's criticism, even though theologians may not find it wholly adequate. In his preface he wrote that he “was not searching for a Platonic Form, Femininity-in-Writing, which would manifest itself in every feminine text;”⁷⁵ and he has applied his critical skills to the task of reading the book for what it is, spiritual discourse. We should not allow ourselves to be misdirected by his phrase “mystic nihilism,” several times repeated, into thinking that he believes that he can find in Margaret any rejection of faith, any scepticism or denial of the realities of the life of the spirit. He has read her book too carefully, and, it is evident, with too much sympathy for that. He is using ‘nihilism’ in the rare and narrow sense recorded by Robert Alfred Vaughan: “To lose, in utter Nihilism, all sense of any existence separate from the Divine Substance.” That Margaret knew, or claimed that she knew, this loss of perception of her separate self is well attested in the Mirror. What Dronke means by ‘mystic’ he does not say. Beyond doubt, Margaret wished to be so regarded, as having attained “the peak or perfection of freedom;”⁷⁶ but we can only record our conviction that her spirituality is purely intellectual, with no indications that she had received any of the private revelations of the secrets of the divine nature which are the distinguishing marks of genuine mysticism. The techniques of probatio, of ‘proving of spirits’, are the subject of many works of guidance, which, like all sound theology, are founded on common sense and practical experience. In one of the discourses warning his followers against false prophets who will claim to speak in his name, Christ tells us that we can know the true from impersonators by the fruit of their works.⁷⁷ The Spanish bishop, Alphonse of Pecha, wrote to defend Bridget of Sweden, who had been his spiritual charge, against accusations of fraudulence, and provided a work manlike list of the principles of probatio. One of them is: “Does [the mystic] submit himself and his insights humbly to the judgment of his spiritual director and of others who live prudently and soberly the life of the spirit, fearing to be deluded … or does he persist in acting as his own director and judge?”⁷⁸

The Mirror of Simple Souls is very far from offering evidence of such submissiveness or humility. Rather, this “Simple Soul” rejoices in her certainty that she and her peers “are properly called ‘Holy Church’, for they support and teach and nurture the whole of ‘Holy Church’.”⁷⁹ Her book nowhere suggests that Margaret took counsel with anyone except those predisposed to agree with her, whose ‘customs’, usages, to employ her calculatedly ambivalent term, were also hers.⁸⁰

We know of only two persons, Guy of Colmieu and William of Paris, who attempted to direct Margaret away from her usages, to persuade her that her ‘way’ was hostile to the Catholic Church and should therefore be renounced; and in this they failed utterly. They had judged her, by their own lights, according to her fruits, the Mirror. How far were they justified in treating it as the work of a heresiarch which could, if not obliterated, poison the life of their Church?

Others have sought to answer this question; and the widely differing conclusions which, we have seen, modern scholars have offered—Romana Guarnieri herself, Robert Lerner, Jean Orcibal, Peter Dronke, Huot de Longchamp, Paul Verdeyen and Kurt Ruh—show that this is no easy task.

Margaret displays an impatience, common enough, though rarely so openly shown, with theologians' reliance on arid learning to replace for them what she regards as her superior, God-given insights. Their dry-as-dust approach to spirituality she personifies as Reason, the adversary, in her system, of Love, the true love of the creator for his creatures. She expresses this in what had become a commonplace among such writers when, in Chapter 9, we read: “This Soul is learning in the school of Divine Knowledge;”⁸¹ and we have shown how in several places she indicates her poor opinion of “every teacher of natural wisdom, every teacher of book-learning.”⁸² In Chapter 7, when Reason appeals to Love for explanations of her words, Love replies: “The one whom God has given of it knows that, and no-one else, for no book contains it, nor can man's intelligence comprehend it … ;”⁸³ and in Chapter 41 Holy Church (‘the Less’, of course) asks the Holy Spirit for enlightenment, “for this word surpasses our writings, and we cannot understand through Reason what it conveys.”⁸⁴

In the end, Margaret's solution is that in Chapter 87 the Soul announces that “Reason is dead,”⁸⁵ so that Love has to speak in Reason's place,⁸⁶ even though later Reason reappears with no explanation of the resuscitation.⁸⁷ This is very different from what is proposed by pseudo-Dionysius, who teaches in the Divine Names that love and reason must live together in the soul; and it seems to diverge from Margaret's own earlier insistence in Chapter 15 that a well-balanced spiritual life cannot be formed unless the soul “does this by using the subtlety of his considerable natural intelligence and … the intense light of Spiritual Understanding.”⁸⁸

The lack of precision and plan which shows in Reason's death and reemergence points to Margaret's unwillingness, or, it may be, her inability to order her thinking on what she had chosen as her book's central theme, the progress of the soul towards annihilation. We have suggested that what is now found in the Mirror's Chapters 123-129, what follows the first ‘Explicit’, represents her attempt to reorder and restate what had been contained in the book's original form. In Chapter 122, where she seems to be announcing the culmination of the progress in “the splendid entry and the worthy dwelling of the human creature in the sweet humanity of the Son of God our Savior,”⁸⁹ she composes a rondeau, an envoi, a song of the Soul's farewell, “for … from this day on in its graciousness Perfect Love has set me apart.” This is to be a separation as complete as she then could conceive, “from myself, from my neighbors and from the whole world:”

Thought is no further use to me,
          Nor works, nor words so wise … ;(90)

and the separation brings liberation to the Soul:

Now divine light
          has set me free from prison,
And in its nobility has united me
          to Love's divine will.(91)

Now, however, another farewell seems to have suggested itself: in Chapter 132 she tells us that Love “had given me my death,”⁹² and that this death is her own “pure nothingness.” “Love is; and no-one is, if he is not of her, and therefore I say that this has wholly satisfied me.” She ends the chapter by telling us that her envoi is in fact her taking leave of the human intellect and any appeals which it can make to her. The Soul will reject them, as Love rejected Reason: “If you do not understand this, I cannot express it otherwise. This is a miraculous work, and no-one can tell you anything of it without lying.”⁹³

We have for long been given hints that this will be the soul's last state, which will not be susceptible to intelligent formulation. From the beginning we have been told that liberation, deification will set the soul free from its bondage to created nature, and will raise it into the divine life by spiritual extinction. Now this is called, in Chapter 134, the Soul's attainment “to the greatest perfection of life,” when “the more makes itself plain to her, and that has set her free from the less; and she wills to have this more, firmly established within herself, without any means.”

How this “more” may be possessed in the soul, as an object of its own will, and yet be received “without any means,” is a difficulty which cannot be solved without contradiction. Even before the era of pseudo-Dionysius, deification had been understood as an act of God in the soul, received by the soul in terms of the limitations of its own nature and developed capacity, and, especially, in terms of the distinction between creator and creatures. Deification, accordingly, is nowhere but in the soul; and it does not remove these distinctions. This being so, the soul and its abilities are the receptive “means” of deification. Margaret seems, however, to have little concern for preserving the soul's human identity, and, instead, she regards humanity not as anything to be redeemed, but as a barrier which should be transcended. In Chapter 14 she had acknowledged that “humanity is glorified in Paradise, joined to the person of the Son;” but, like Ruusbroec, she considers the love of Christ's earthly humanity to be a potential obstacle to the love of his divinity, and so she suggests that it was for the removal of this obstacle that the humanity of Christ was replaced in the world by the Pentecostal comforts of the Holy Spirit.⁹⁴

Whether the humanity of Christ as it is now in heaven and as it was in his life on earth are identical is not a question on which she speculates; and, consequently, she does not consider whether the Hypostatic Union, the joining of the divine and the human in the single person of Christ, according to nature, can serve as the model of what, through deification, man might be according to grace.

There is no certain indication that she does consider deification by reference to the Hypostatic Union; and in Chapters 14 and 15, the uncharacteristic fashion in which she affirms her faith in the Real Presence may suggest that she finds her model rather in transubstantiation. This is to some extent supported by Love's testimony in Chapter 21: “I am God, says Love, for Love is God, and God is Love, and this Soul is God through the condition of love, and I am God by my divine nature, and this Soul is God by love's just law. So that this my precious Beloved is taught and guided by me, without herself, for she has been changed into me. And this is the outcome, says Love, of being nourished by me.”⁹⁵ Similarly, in Chapter 39, Love asserts her claims over those of Reason upon the Soul: “for Love, who has changed her into itself, dwells in her. So that this Soul is herself Love, and Love has no distinction in it, though in all things such distinctions should be preserved, but only not in Love.”⁹⁶ Of course, to interpret these passages as comparisons of deification with transubstantiation requires us to understand “has been changed into me,” est muee en moy, and “has changed her into itself,” qui l'a muee en luy, quite literally, without equivocation. Yet there is nothing implausible in this, as we can see from the alchemical imagery which Margaret uses in her description of the soul's divinization: “no kind of fire can keep any matter separate within it, because it makes of itself and of the matter one thing; not two, but one. So it is with those of whom we speak, for Love draws all their matter into itself. One and the same thing is made of Love and of such Souls, and not two things, for that would be disharmony; but there is one single thing, and so there is harmony.”⁹⁷ In the previous chapter, 82, the soul in union is compared with the bride whose spouse's love “has wholly changed his bride into himself;” but here the metaphor of combustion is harmonized with this: “One and the same thing is made of Love and of such Souls, and not two things, for that would be disharmony.” The annihilated soul is transformed into the divine substance. The theme and the metaphor are resumed in Chapter 117, when the Soul says: “I have all his goodness, I am therefore what he is, through the transmutation of love.”⁹⁸ This “transmutation,” muance d'amour—mutatio amoris—resembles nothing so much as the changing of base metal into that which is precious, the transubstantiation of the sacred species in the Mass. Just as consecration changes the substance of bread and wine, the deified soul is transformed, brought to nothing by the power of Far-Near, who, as a catalyst, is never a part of the change which he produces. This conversion of the Soul, by Love, into Love, obliterates the distinction between the creator and the creature: “Such creatures can no longer say anything about God, for they can no more say who God is than where he is.”⁹⁹ In the moment of deification, the very distinction between creator and creature cannot be seen: “For this is the true and pure kernel of divine Love, in which there is no created matter, and it is given to the creature by the creator.”¹⁰⁰

Notes

1. Chapter 9, note 5 [Colledge, Edmund, J. C. Marler, and Judith Grant. The Mirror of Simple Souls by Margarete Porete. South Bend, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999].

2. See, in Chapter 8, Love's third speech.

3. See, in Chapter 21, Love's third speech and our comment in note 1.

4. Colledge and Guarnieri, “The Glosses by ‘M.N.’ and Richard Methley,” pp. 381-382.

5. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit, p. 201, note 3.

6. See, in Chapter 17, Love's first and second speeches.

7. See, in Chapter 20, Love's third speech.

8. See, in Chapter 8, Reason's first speech.

9. See, in Chapter 12, The Soul's speech.

10. See, in Chapter 13, Reason's second speech.

11. See, in Chapter 53, The Soul's first speech.

12. This immediately precedes Margaret's Prologue which, in the table of chapter-titles, is identified as Chapter 1.

13. See, in Chapter 9, Love's third speech.

14. See, in Chapter 9, Love's third speech and our comment in note 6.

15. Chapter 21, note 2; and cf. Chapter 42, note 2.

16. Chapter 35, note 4; Chapter 65, note 6.

17. Chapter 62, note 5.

18. Ruh, Meister Eckhart, p. 99.

19. See, in Chapter 17, the speech of Divine Justice.

20. See, in Chapter 16, Love's fourth speech.

21. Luke 10.42.

22. See, in Chapter 71, Love's first speech.

23. See, in Chapter 45, The Soul's second speech.

24. See, in Chapter 13, Love's first speech and our comment in note 3.

25. See, in Chapter 100, the third paragraph of Love's speech.

26. See, in Chapter 5, Love's third speech.

27. See, in Chapter 19, Love's first speech.

28. Ruh, Meister Eckhart, p. 100.

29. See, in Chapter 15, Light of Faith's speech and our comments in notes 2 and 3.

30. Viard, ed., Les grandes chroniques, 8:273.

31. Colledge and Guarnieri, “The Glosses by ‘M.N.’ and Richard Methley,” pp. 376-377.

32. See, in Chapter 9, Love's second speech and our comment in note 3.

33. See, in Chapter 13, Reason's second speech.

34. See, in Chapter 13, Love's third speech.

35. Cf. Colledge and Marler, “Poverty of the Will,” pp. 27-28.

36. Colledge and Guarnieri, “The Glosses by ‘M.N.’ and Richard Methley,” pp. 365, 372.

37. Ruh, Meister Eckhart, p. 97.

38. Colledge and Marler, “Poverty of the Will,” pp. 15-16.

39. Ruh, Meister Eckhart, p. 111.

40. Ruh, Meister Eckhart, p. 111.

41. Ruh, Meister Eckhart, p. 111.

42. See, in Chapter 7, Love's third speech.

43. See, in Chapter 77, the speech of Graciousness.

44. Chapter 77, note 2.

45. Romana Guarnieri, “Frères du Libre Esprit,” col. 1259.

46. Colledge, “Meister Eckhart: His Times and his Writings,” p. 246 and note 24.

47. Brian Tierney, Foundations of the Conciliar Theory, p. 82, note 4, citing MS Lincoln Chapter Library 2; there is still no printed edition of Huguccio's works.

48. Tierney, Foundations of the Conciliar Theory, p. 213.

49. See Johann Haller, ed., Die Protokolle des Concils von 1434 und 1435 and Die Protokolle des Concils von 1436: Concilium Basilense.

50. Guarnieri, Il Movimento, pp. 488-491.

51. Guarnieri, Il Movimento, pp. 490-491.

52. Ruh, “Le Miroir des simples âmes der Marguerite Porete,” pp. 366-369.

53. Abel Lefranc, ed., Les dernières poésies de Marguerite de Navarre, quoted in part in Guarnieri, Il Movimento, p. 490. In her account, Dr. Guarnieri cites Eugéne Parturier, “Les Sources du mysticisme de Marguerite de Navarre,” Revue de la Renaissance 5 (1904), pp. 1-16 and 49-62. However, Parturier's discussion of the queen's ‘mysticism’ is of little value, as he could not in 1904 have known anything of Margaret Porette's work.

54. Lefranc, ed., Les dernières poésies, p. 232.

55. See Edmund Colledge, “Lay Piety as a Force in Late Medieval Spirituality,” pp. 5-6 and notes.

56. See J. K. Atkinson, “Les compléments prédicatifs dans Li livres de confort de philosophie de Jean de Meun,” p. 391.

57. See, in Chapter 8, Love's third speech.

58. See A. J. Denomy, The Heresy of Courtly Love.

59. Moshé Lazar, Amour Courtois et “Fin' Amors” dans la littérature du xii^e siècle, p. 135.

60. F. N. Robinson, ed., The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, p. 265.

61. Jacques Ribard, “Introduction à une étude polysémique du Roman de la Rose du Guillaume de Lorris,” p. 527.

62. R. F. Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages.

63. Arthur T. Hatto, Essays in Mediaeval German and Other Poetry, pp. 3-11.

64. Hatto, Essays in Mediaeval German, pp. 20-21.

65. See, in Chapter 27, The Soul's speech.

66. See, in Chapter 39, Reason's first speech and notes 2 and 3.

67. See, in Chapter 52, Love's first speech and our comment in note 1.

68. Jean Orcibal, “Le Miroir des simples âmes et la ‘secte’ du Libre Esprit,” p. 43 and notes.

69. See, in Chapter 122, the fifth stanza of The Soul's second poem.

70. Frederick F. Pickering, Augustinus oder Boethius?

71. Marc-René Jung, “Der Rosenroman in der Kritik seit dem 19. Jahrhundert.”

72. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou.

73. Matthew Fox, “Meister Eckhart and Karl Marx: The Mystic as Practical Theologian.”

74. Alexander Murray, “Religion Among the Poor in Thirteenth-Century France,” p. 285.

75. Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, p. x.

76. See, in Chapter 139, the second paragraph.

77. Matthew 7.15-16.

78. Bazire and Colledge, eds., The Chastising of God's Children, p. 174, lines 2-6. Chapters 19 and 20 of The Chastising of God's Children were translated from Chapters 2 and 6 of Alphonse of Pecha's Epistola solitarii ad reges.

79. See, in Chapter 43, Love's first speech.

80. We have already cited Chapter 139, the second paragraph, to support this.

81. See, in Chapter 9, Love's third speech and our comment in note 6.

82. See, in Chapter 9, Love's third speech.

83. See, in Chapter 7, Love's second speech.

84. See, in Chapter 41, Holy Church's second speech and our comment in note 7.

85. See, in Chapter 87, The Soul's third speech.

86. See, in Chapter 87, Love's second speech.

87. See, in Chapter 89, Reason's speech.

88. See, in Chapter 15, the speech of Graciousness of the Goodness of Love.

89. See, in Chapter 122, The Soul's speech and our comment in note 1.

90. See, in Chapter 122, the first stanza of The Soul's second poem.

91. See, in Chapter 122, the sixth stanza of The Soul's second poem.

92. See, in Chapter 132, the second paragraph.

93. See, in Chapter 132, the last paragraph.

94. See, in Chapter 15, Truth's second speech.

95. See, in Chapter 21, Love's third speech.

96. See, in Chapter 39, Love's fourth speech.

97. Chapter 83.

98. See, in Chapter 117, the third paragraph of The Soul's speech.

99. Chapter 18.

100. Chapter 18.

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