[In the following essay, Bryant summarizes Porete's life and examines the official denunciation of The Mirror of Simple Souls as a heretical work in the early fourteenth century.]

Sometime between 1296 and 1306, in Valenciennes, Guy II, bishop of Cambrai, condemned the Mirror of Simple Souls as heretical and ordered it publicly burned in the presence of its author, Marguerite Porete. On June 1, 1310, Marguerite herself was burned in what Henry Charles Lea calls “the first formal auto-da-fé of which we have cognizance at Paris.”¹ These two burnings mark the chronological limits of what we know of Marguerite's life, for aside from the inquisitorial account of her trial and allusions to it in fourteenth-century chronicles, no documents survive. Nevertheless, scholars agree that she came from Hainaut (a region south of Flanders and Brabant, today part of France and Belgium), since she is referred to as Margarita de Hannonia.

Marguerite escaped punishment in her first tangle with the ecclesiastical authorities; although forbidden on pain of excommunication to disseminate her ideas further, she boldly persisted, even sending her book to prominent Churchmen, some of whom actually approved it.² Brought before the successor of Guy II, Philip of Marigny, in 1306 or 1307, she was once again accused of heresy and of leading common folk astray. We trace her next to late 1308, in Paris, where she had fallen into the hands of William Humbert, the papal inquisitor and Dominican confessor to Philip the Fair, remembered for the part he played in the brutal trial of the Templars that same year.

Imprisoned in Paris, Marguerite refused to ask for absolution or take vows required for examination; she was left to languish for eighteen months. Since the inquisitor lacked direct testimony, he extracted a number of articles from Marguerite's book and submitted them to a commission of twenty-one theological regents of the Sorbonne for examination. On April 11, 1310, the canon lawyers delivered their verdict, unanimously declaring at least fifteen of the articles heretical. Among them were the first—“the annihilated soul takes leave of the virtues and is no longer in their servitude, because it no longer needs them; rather the virtues obey the soul's every sign”—and the fifteenth—“such a soul no longer cares about God's consolations or His gifts; it neither should nor can because it is completely turned toward God, which prevents it from caring about them.”³

Judged ipso facto on the evidence of her work, Marguerite was relinquished on May 31, 1310, to secular justice as a relapsed heretic, with the customary adjuration for mercy: “ut citra mortem et membrorum mutilatum secum agat misericorditer.”⁴ Guiart of Cressonsacq, a follower of the vita apostolica, apparently tried to intervene in her behalf but was also imprisoned.⁵ The provost of Paris sentenced her to be burned at the stake; the following day, along with a converted Jew who had allegedly spit on an image of the Virgin, she perished in the flames in the Place de Grève. According to the continuer of the Chronicon of William of Nangis, her courage and devotion drew sympathetic tears from the crowd.⁶

The accounts of the proceedings of Marguerite's trial and the brief passages in contemporary chronicles provide no biographical information concerning her education, calling, or social station, except that they refer to her as a Beguine. In the Myreur des histors Jean des Preis described her as a “beghine en clergie mult suffissant” (a Beguine very capable in theology),⁷ a judgment echoed in the Grandes chroniques de France, where Marguerite is called a “béguine clergesse.”⁸ The canon lawyers responsible for the condemnation of the Mirror of Simple Souls called her by the Latin term beguina.

What does the term “Beguine” mean, and whom did it designate? The origin of the word continues to defy the efforts of etymologists, who derive it variously from Middle English beggar or beggere, ‘beggar’; from al-Bigen-sis, which refers to a heresy taking its name from the French town of Albi; from the name of a twelfth-century priest, Lambert le Begue; and from Old French beige or bege, the color of the penitent rope worn by the Beguines and their male counterparts, Beghards.⁹

Although at first glance this appellation seems to define Marguerite's role and status in fourteenth-century society, certainty is out of the question, for despite the prevalence of the epithets Beghard and Beguine in the later Middle Ages, it is hard to generalize about these men and women. Roughly, however, a Beguine or a Beghard can be defined as a lay follower of the apostolic life who, in imitation of Christ, pursued a life of poverty and abstinence, like the mendicant friars. Beguines dressed in a monklike costume. Some formed self-supporting organized communities, while others led a vagabond life of beggary. Unlike members of orders recognized by the Church, they were bound by neither formal vows nor a common rule. Because of overcrowding and the high fees required to enter most convents, many unmarried women of the urban middle class associated themselves with the Beguine movement, although women from the upper classes were by no means absent from their numbers.¹⁰ Single girls thus banded together to earn their livelihood, as “spinsters,” supporting themselves by manual labor such as woolworking. Lester Little observes, “As with the poor who joined the Humiliati, the poor women of Netherlandish towns could find economic security, social stability, and a deep sense of spiritual fulfillment in the urban religious confraternity and consorority of the Beguines.”¹¹ Many wealthy Beguines sponsored poorer ones, supplying them with housing.¹² Such arrangements as these were not an unlikely alternative in a century when the number of marriageable women far exceeded that of men.

The great variety of life-styles that the Beguine movement represented goes against E. W. McDonnell's conclusion that Marguerite “must have been an unattached beguine, with no fixed residence, regarding mendicancy as a means of livelihood, pursuing a life of moral laxity, and refusing to submit to authority.”¹³ The fact that her name appears on none of the registers of the occupants of organized béguinages is no reason to exclude other possibilities. Beguines did not necessarily live in communities or even together in the Beguine houses; some remained at home with their families. McDonnell assumes the same untenable position as did the Church in its vain attempt to distinguish between “good” and “bad” Beguines. The Church condemned the indolent life and the unregulated mendicancy of the “heretic” Beguines who lived on alms and were alleged to interpret the Bible erroneously, yet periodically it exonerated the chaste and pious Beguines who had pledged themselves to a life of charity and obedience.¹⁴

Actually, no such clear separation is possible; even the polyvalence of the term “Beguine” illustrates the ambiguity of their status. “Beguine” could be used to mock the ridiculously righteous or denounce those of loose morals or even expose the hypocrisy of tartuffes. The term was a synonym for “heretic,” particularly a single female heretic; more neutrally, it could signify an unmarried secular person devoted to spiritual matters.¹⁵ The history of the movement is marked by continuous cycles of persecution and rehabilitation, cycles that alternate between a complete condemnation of Beguine status and a conditional endorsement of the “good” Beguines, that is, of orthodox, nonmendicant laywomen.

Romana Guarnieri, whose critical introduction and transcription of a French copy of the Mirror remain the basic work on the subject, has done much toward reevaluating Marguerite by identifying her as the author of the “anonymous” Miroir des simples âmes. Guarnieri points out that the author of the Mirror must have been highly educated, especially in theological matters, and entirely conversant with contemporary court literature and minnemystik. The encouragement and protection given Marguerite by several prominent Churchmen as well as internal evidence from the Mirror lead Guarnieri to postulate her as a well-born, cultivated woman.¹⁶ As Robert Lerner observes, Marguerite frequently expresses sentiments of the aristocracy and uses feudal-aristocratic metaphors as vehicles for her ideas.¹⁷ This aura of refinement of the patrician mystic addressing herself to a clandestine feminine following contrasts sharply with the wandering promiscuity of McDonnell's beggar maiden. Whether or not one accepts Guarnieri's interpretation or Lerner's suggestion, certainly there is no evidence of Marguerite's “moral laxity”; not even Philip the Fair's inquisition leveled this favorite charge against her.

Marguerite's condemnation in 1310 must be seen against the background of growing hostility on the part of the Church toward the numerous extrareligious groups, which were resented as rivals, especially those claiming to unravel the mysteries of scripture.¹⁸ Particularly disconcerting to the Church was the promulgation of the idea that sacred authority rested less on ordination and more on poverty, purity, and evangelism.¹⁹ The “Clementines,” decrees issued by the Council of Vienne (1311-1312), ushered in a period of official persecution which, perhaps, began with the death of Marguerite, since six of the bishops who formed her jury later served as members of this council. Although Marguerite was burned as a heretic, not as a Beguine, the decrees of Vienne rendered the words synonymous.

For example, the bull Ad Nostrum specifies the Beguines and Beghards as guilty of the heresy of the Free Spirit, enumerating eight errors in their beliefs: (1) humans can attain a sinless state, (2) in which sensuality is so subordinated to the soul that the body may be freely granted whatever it likes; (3) in this “spirit of liberty” individuals are not subject to human obedience (4) and can attain the same perfection of beatitude on earth as in heaven; (5) every intelligent nature is blessed in itself, (6) and the acts of virtue are necessary only for those who are imperfect, for the perfect soul no longer needs to practice them; (7) the carnal act is not a sin; (8) the perfect should not rise during the elevation of the Host, for to think of the sacrament of the Eucharist or the Passion of Christ would be a sign of imperfection, a descent from the heights of perfection.²⁰ While these heretical ideas are by no means novel—many of them had been refuted by Albertus Magnus' Determinatio, written sometime between 1262 and 1280—they do reflect the Roman papacy's urgent concern to legislate against heterodoxy. The Ad Nostrum, which has been called a birth certificate without a baby, asserts that the Free Spirit abounded among the Beguines and Beghards.²¹

As a mystic, Marguerite wrote of her quest of union with God. Like her contemporaries Mechthild of Magdeburg and Hadewijch, she clothed her experiences in bridal imagery. Her mysticism, deemed radical and heretic by the inquisition, differs from that of her contemporaries not so much in intensity or purpose as in method. It is her advocacy, as Lerner points out, of complete and perfect passivity of the will in attaining the divine experience—which rendered the sacramental ministry of the Church unnecessary in the final stages of the soul's ascent to perfection—that was found objectionable.²² Her doctrinal heresy, on the other hand, adjudged by her persecutors to be of the Free Spirit, has not been unanimously established. As a Free Spirit, she was deemed guilty of pantheism and antinomianism. Pantheism she did advocate, but accusations of anti-nomianism seem unfounded.

Because the Mirror of Simple Souls contains many passages expressing ideas similar to those denounced by the Council of Vienne and attributed to the Brethren of the Free Spirit, Marguerite has been called “the first apostle in France of the German sect of the Brethren of the Free Spirit.”²³ The only justification for this claim, however, lies in the fact that the Mirror is the only important document anterior to the Council of Vienne to assemble, in part, this heretical doctrine, but since it cannot be proved that an identifiable sect existed, it is difficult to prove her its spokes-woman. Moreover, modern theological scholars are by no means as certain of its heterodoxy as were the canonists of 1310. Neither were the accusations of heterodoxy unanimous during Marguerite's lifetime and later. The Mirror survived in numerous monastery copies, and it was attributed to the authorship of Ruysbroeck—two facts indicating that not everyone deemed its tenets objectionable.

Certainly two points cited as heretical by the canonists—that the soul annihilated in the love of God needs neither to pursue virtue nor perform exterior practices of devotion—are repeated often in the Mirror. In the third state (chapter 118) the soul is required, as a sacrifice, to give up all works in order to reach the fourth state, union with God in an ecstasy of love. A third point of contention, bearing suggestions of pantheism and antinomianism, is that the annihilated soul is free to grant nature, without remorse, all it desires.²⁴ While this point is in the text, the following sentence tempers the claim: “But such a nature is so well ordered by its transformation in the union with Love that Nature demands nothing which might be forbidden.”²⁵ The explanation confirms the pantheistic but denies the potentially antinomian tenets of the text.

Other passages doubtless deemed improper by the canon lawyers are those that speak of the sacrament of the Church²⁶ as well as those that refer to the Catholic Church as “Holy Church the Little” and to the community of Free Souls as “Holy Church the Great.” Holy Church the Little is governed by reason; Holy Church the Great by divine love. Moreover, from the opening verses of the Mirror, Marguerite criticizes the learning of the clerics, which prevents them from understanding her mystical treatise: “Theologians or other clerics, you will not have any understanding of it [the Mirror], so learnèd are your minds.” But the Mirror is a mystical treatise, not a diatribe against the clergy. A long prose tract written to be read aloud, it was dictated ostensibly to its author by Love, who appears as the major interlocutor—Love, questioned by Reason, defines the annihilated soul and the states or “beings” through which this soul must pass in order to reach the state of perfection.

Unfortunately, the Mirror has survived only in late manuscript copies and translations; whether or not these have been altered much cannot be determined. Of the three surviving French versions, only one is available to scholarship: Manuscript Chantilly Condé F. 14. 26 (formerly 386), written between 1450 and 1530 near Orléans. Although generally regarded as corrupt, this version is nevertheless considered closest to its prototype. There are many fifteenth-century Latin and Italian translations of the Mirror and three Middle English versions, one published by Marilyn Dorion in the Archivio Italiano per la Storia della Pietà. Another was translated into modern English in 1927 and published by the Downside Benedictines.²⁷

The astonishing number of manuscripts testifies to the international popularity of the work, especially in the fifteenth century. In England, for example, it was circulated by the English charterhouses, having been introduced into the country by, perhaps, a member of the suite of Philippa of Hainaut when she arrived as the bride of Edward III in 1327. In France, the Mirror had at least one royal reader, Marguerite de Navarre, who praises it in her late poem “Prisons,” which, like chapter 61 of the Mirror, tells of the Farnear.²⁸ But the research required to determine exactly who read the Mirror of Simple Souls and in what spirit remains to be done, as well as the reconstruction of the Old French archetype.

Notes

1. Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages [New York, 1888], vol. 1, p. 123.

2. Romana Guarnieri, “Il movimento del Libero Spirito, testi e documenti,” Archivio Italiano per la Storia della Pietà 4 (1965): 408.

3. Paul Frédéricq, Corpus documentorum inquisitionis haereticae pravitatis Neerlandicae, vol. 2 [Ghent, 1889-1903], pp. 63-64.

4. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 159-161, or Lea, vol. 2, pp. 575-577.

5. For a discussion of Guiart, see Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1972], pp. 77-78. This self-possessed “Angel of Philadelphia” was the leader of a group of mendicants, the “adherents of the Lord,” who wore a special habit. He insisted that even the pope himself did not have the right to strip him of his garb; however, when faced with the stake, he faltered, abjured his errors, and was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment.

6. Frédéricq, vol. 1, p. 160, or C. V. Langlois, “Marguerite Porète,” Revue Historique 54 (1894): 295-299.

7. Guarnieri's edition of the Mirror in “Il movimento del Libero Spirito,” p. 594, or Jean d'Outremeuse des Preis, Myreur des histors, vol. 6, pp. 141-142.

8. Frédéricq, vol. 2, p. 64, or Les grandes chroniques de France, ed. Paulin, vol. 5, p. 188.

9. Dayton Phillips, “Beguines in Medieval Strasbourg” [Ph.D. dissertation, 1946], pp. 2-6.

10. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium [London. 1970], p. 160.

11. Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe [Ithaca, 1978], p. 133.

12. Gordon Leff, Heresy in the Later Middle Ages, vol. 1 [New York, 1967], p. 320, or Phillips, p. 23.

13. E. W. McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture [New Brunswick, N.J., 1954], p. 367. See Hermann Haupt, “Zwei Traktate gegen Beginen und Begharden,” Zeitschrift für Kultur und Geschichte 12 (1891): 85, for a similar judgment.

14. Little, pp. 130 ff., for example, discusses the bull of Gregory IX in 1233, which approved of “good” (because cloistered) Beguines (beguinae clausae) and disapproved of the others (beguinae singulariter in saeculo manentes, congregationes beguinarum).

15. See Lerner, pp. 38-40, for interesting examples.

16. Guarnieri [Archivio Italiano per la Storia della Pietà 4 (1965): 351-708], p. 510.

17. Lerner, p. 233.

18. See McDonnell, p. 366, for a contemporary criticism of translations and commentaries on Beguine conventicles, as well as Jean-Claude Schmitt, Mort d'une hérésie [Paris, 1978], p. 104. On the Church's biblical exegesis, see Bernard Hamilton, The Medieval Inquisition, and Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from Bogomil to Huss.

19. See Walter L. Wakefield, Heresy, Crusade and Inquisition in Southern France [London, 1974], pp. 22-27, and Hamilton, The Medieval Inquisition [New York, 1981].

20. For the Ad Nostrum, see E. Friedberg, Corpus iuris canonici, vol. 2, col. 1183 [Leipzig, 1881], or H. Kaminsky, “The Free Spirit in the Hussite Revolution” [in Millenial Dreams in Action, ed. Sylvia L. Thrupp, The Hague, 1962].

21. Lerner, p. 83.

22. Ibid., pp. 204-205.

23. Lea, vol. 2, p. 123.

24. This point appears only in the continuation of the Chronicon of William of Nangis.

25. The passage is found in chapter 8, Guarnieri, p. 527. Chapter 17, p. 537, is similar.

26. Ibid., chapter 15, p. 535.

27. See Clare Kirchberger, The Mirror of Simple Souls [New York, 1927], in the bibliography.

28. See Jean Dagens, “Le miroir des simples âmes et Marguerite de Navarre” [in La Mystique rhénane, Paris, 1963].