[In the following essay, Dronke examines the lyrical, mystical, and erotic expressions of divine love in Porete's The Mirror of Simple Souls and situates the work in its historical context.]

Hildegard of Bingen, as distinctive in her medical and cosmological writing as in her mystic visions and poems and drama, died in 1179. The hundred and twenty years that followed her death saw an astounding proliferation of writings by religious women, Latin and vernacular, prose and verse. Some of the high imaginative achievements of this period—the lyrics of Hadewijch of Antwerp, or Mechthild of Magdeburg's Flowing Light of Godhead, with its haunting transitions from prose to rhyming free verse, from inner dialogues to dramatically shaped scenes—have received expert and sensitive treatment in recent decades. The woman to whose imaginative testament I wish to turn today, Marguerite Porete, has remained largely unknown. She is the most neglected of the great writers of the thirteenth century. She wrote her book of poetic prose, dialogue and lyric about 1285-95. The full title that she gave it was ‘The mirror of simple annihilated souls, who dwell only in will and desire of Love’ (Le mirouer des simples ames anienties et qui seulement demourent en vouloir et desir d'amour). The text has been printed, by Romana Guarnieri, who also furnished a well-documented historical introduction. Nonetheless, numerous problems of textual criticism still remain, and a literary interpretation has not yet been attempted.

The thirteenth-century women writers belonged for the most part not to traditional foundations of nuns or canonesses, but to the new and in many ways freer communities of the time, of which the béguinages were the most numerous, especially in northern Europe. In such communities, women were less sheltered—and often less privileged—than in the older ones; they were encouraged to tasks that involved the outer world, such as caring for the poor and the sick. Yet the new generations of women writers do not look at the outer world: indeed their most marked common feature is a greatly increased subjectivity.

As Hildegard had projected a vision of Love (Caritas) in the figure of a sublimely beautiful celestial Domina, so too a womanly divine emanation, Minne or Amour, occurs—and often becomes a protagonist—in many of the thirteenth-century women's writings. But where Hildegard oriented her vision of Love wholly towards a theological allegory of the incarnation and redemption, the appearances of Minne-Amour are occasions for dialogue with the soul of the writer, for a series of exchanges which, while they touch on many of the major Christian beliefs, have their raison d'être in their detailed evocation of the writer's inner life, her hopes and despairs, fears and sorrows, moments of ecstatic fulfilment and aching emptiness. Where Hildegard used visions in order to show her individual map of the Christian cosmos, the thirteenth-century women show the map of a soul in solitude, however intensely that soul may be pervaded by Christian presences.

But the most striking difference between Hildegard and the succeeding generations is this. Hildegard's daring was always—except in her two physical treatises—circumscribed by her affirmation that she wrote in the name of the ‘living light’, not in her own. This meant that, once her prophetic gift had been officially acknowledged as genuine (the papal sanction came in 1147, even before her first major work was complete), her utterances were almost beyond challenge. When she spoke out against Church authorities, or against Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, it was with the prophet's impunity. The thirteenth-century women speak in their own name. They are not prophets, but passionate, often anguished, minds. The beauty of their writing is bound up with their vulnerability.

Angela of Foligno, Marguerite Porete's Italian contemporary, was revered by her Franciscan advisers in her lifetime and beatified soon after she died. Her autobiographical memorial, recorded by her confessor, was unfailingly treasured. By contrast, Marguerite's Miroir led to her being persecuted, and at last atrociously put to death. Like Angela, Marguerite tells of divine love and how she experiences it; like hers, Marguerite's language to evoke that love can be provocative and deliberately shocking. The reason she was attacked, however, had little to do with this. It was rather that, unlike Angela, she laid claim to new perceptions of the divine realm, and of the Church. So too, in a sense, had Hildegard of Bingen—yet Hildegard had advanced such thoughts only in her recognized function as messenger of the divine light. Here Marguerite showed a fateful audacity. Like Hildegard, she castigated those in all ranks of the clergy who failed to welcome her unique insights. But where Hildegard did this with a prophet's safe-conduct, Marguerite did so of her own accord, speaking only in the name of the ‘simple souls’, the ‘free souls’—an invisible ideal community to which she aspired to belong, and which she was certain should guide and judge the ‘Little Church’ that is established on earth, Sainte Eglise la Petite.

Marguerite's work was publicly condemned at Valenciennes (probably her native city) around 1300, but this did not shake her convictions or lead her to renounce them. The free souls, she believed, must never be cowed by Sainte Eglise la Petite. Because of her persistence she was imprisoned, tried and executed, publicly burnt in Paris on June 1, 1310, at the instigation of the archbishop of Paris and the papal inquisitor. A contemporary witness tells that her nobility of bearing and her devotion as she went to die made many who were present weep. Marguerite's killers also demanded the surrender of all copies of her book: to retain one meant becoming excommunicate.

And yet they were powerless to prevent the Miroir from being cherished. Though only one manuscript of the French original is known to have been saved, the existence of five medieval translations—two Latin, two Italian, and one English—bears eloquent witness to the continuing spell that Marguerite cast in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This contrasts sadly with the forgottenness of the Miroir today, though in one very recent literary history (1978) there is a hopeful sign. Kurt Ruh mentions the Miroir in the context of Mechthild and Hadewijch, and rightly affirms Marguerite's work, like theirs, a ‘religious testimony of incomparable originality’.¹ The Miroir should also be seen as a text of fundamental importance in relation to the movement, or group of movements, known as the ‘Free Spirit’ (secta spiritus libertatis), and much remains to be done by historians to ascertain its role there. But in the present paper it is some aspects of the Miroir's ‘incomparable originality’, as an imaginative construction and an expression of self-awareness, that I should like to evoke and assess.

The lyrical and the quasi-dramatic passages are integral to the construction. In her extended complex dialogues Marguerite never dispenses with narrative transitions—in this she is closer, for instance, to Ramón Lull than to Mechthild. Yet as in Mechthild's Fliessendes Licht, spontaneous dramatic tension can arise in the interchanges and conflicts between Marguerite's projections of inner and celestial forces, and among these forces (again as in Mechthild) Lady Love takes the lead. A further likeness lies in what we might call the lyrical continuum, which, in the Miroir as in the Fliessendes Licht, extends from rhythmic prose, filled with parallelism and homoioteleuta, to more sustained rhymed passages, to fully poetic forms. But where in Mechthild these always remained free, or irregular, Marguerite on two occasions uses a ‘bound’ form—once a canzone, and once a rondeau. The canzone is her prologue, her first ‘manifesto’; the rondeau comes near the close, and is perhaps the most perfect crystallization of her thoughts. The other lyrical passages occur at high points, at the most daring or climactic moments, throughout the work, and the conclusion of the first version (seventeen further chapters were added later, after the ‘Explicit’), the ‘finale’ of nearly a hundred verses that opens with the rondeau, is purely lyrical. In the course of the Miroir, on the other hand, there are many ‘border’ passages where it may always remain debatable whether a prose or a verse printing gives a more illuminating picture of the rhythm and movement of thought. This is only natural, as the prose continually reaches out into free-flowing, even overflowing, lyrical modulations. For the lyrical element, we might say, is Marguerite's truest element. It is not so much that she chooses to write lyrically, like the composers of religious laude or caroles for instance, in order to fulfil certain expectations for performance, or to attain effects known to be possible in this or that form; rather, it is a vital aspect of the way her imagination moves. She floats into lyrical moments and out of them again, back into prose dialogue, which then, gaining fresh intensity and with it fresh symmetry, hovers once more on the brink of lyricism.

To comprehend Marguerite's erotic depiction of divine love, let us begin with her fable of Alexander:

Once upon a time there was a maiden, a king's daughter, of great heart and gentleness, and of fine spirit too; she lived in a foreign land. It came to pass that she heard tell of the great courtliness and nobility of King Alexander, and at once in intent she loved him, because of the great renown of his noble excellence. Yet this maiden was so far from the great lord in whom she had spontaneously set her love, she could neither see him nor possess him. Because of this she was often disconsolate within herself, since no love save this contented her. And when she saw that this far-off love, which was so close to her, or inside her, was so far outside, she thought she would solace her unease by somehow imagining the looks of her friend, for whose sake she was so often rent in heart. Then she had an image painted, which portrayed the semblance of the king she loved, as close as she could get to portraying the way she loved him, in the affection of the love that held her; and by means of this image, together with her other practices (usages), she dreamt the king herself.

The image of the far-off beloved is familiar from romances and lyrics of human love, as is the exaltation of the state of longing. The mystical tradition, too, had made use of the image of Christ as a chivalric lover, whose beloved is the human soul. What is unusual here is the way Marguerite shows how love can create its own dimension—‘more distant than stars and nearer than the eye’—and its own reality. Is this a purely subjective fabrication of the loving soul? The conclusion Marguerite draws from her fable suggests otherwise: her book, she says, is her image of the noblest King, the far-off heavenly one. But the princess was not given her loved image by Alexander, whereas ‘to make me remember him, he gave me this book, which in some aspects represents his love’ (qui represente en aucuns usages l'amour de lui mesmes).

Again the word usages occurs, bridging subjective and objective experience—just as l'amour de lui mesmes means both the love that comes from the King and the love felt for him by the soul. In the earlier context, the usages that helped the soul to dream her King meant all the cultivation of her love that she undertook (figuratively, we might say, all her practices of prayer and meditation). And in a sense, in the second context, it is these same practices which not only represent the love she feels but which become transformed into signs of his love, his caring for her.

Nonetheless, in the course of the work the subjective note predominates. The princess cannot really tell whether Alexander loves her in return, or whether his love for her is simply her own creation:

She is alone in love … She is the phoenix, which is alone. For this soul is solitary in love, slaking herself with herself.

… all that this soul has within her from God, by gift of divine grace, seems to her nothing; at the same time what she loves, which is inside her, is what he will not give to anyone but her. And understanding it in this way, this soul has all and has nothing, she knows all and knows nothing.

At times this state is imagined as an unchanging bliss:

Such a soul, said Love, swims in the sea of joy—that is, in the sea of delights flowing and streaming down from the godhead. She feels no joy, for she herself is joy, and swims and floats in joy without feeling any joy, for she inhabits joy and joy inhabits her …

Yet the same soul also imagines a series of tests in which her lover treats her with callous cruelty, to gauge how complete is her amorous submission to him. It is only after extravagant unconditional surrender to each of his cruelties that the soul imagines him giving her an unconditional reward. In this scene the fantasies of heartless deception go beyond any comparable motifs known to me in the world of profane romances. After many declarations of torments that she would gladly accept if they were her beloved's will, Marguerite says:

What if he were to ask me what I would do, if I knew he would prefer me to love another more than himself? And at this my senses failed … Then he asked what I would do if it could happen that he might love another more than me. And here my senses failed—I did not know what to answer, what to wish, or what to hide. Beyond this, he asked what I would do … if he might wish for someone other than himself to love me more than he. And again my senses failed … And I said, overcome, how could it be that I should love another more than him, and that he love another more than me, or that another love me better than he? And there I fainted … And still I could have no peace unless he had my answer. I loved myself with him so much that I could not answer lightly … And yet I had to answer, if I did not want to lose both myself and him …

The ambiguity of the subjective and objective love becomes deliberate in the lines that follow:

I said to him of him, that he wanted to test me in all points. Alas, what did I say? Indeed I did not speak a word. The heart all alone waged this battle over him, and it answered in anguish of death that it wanted to abandon its love, by which it had lived …

Here the wording of the French—que il se vouloit despartir de son amour, dont il avoit vesqu—allows equally for the other possibility, that the phrases refer to the lover—the heart protesting that he wants to abandon his love, by which he had lived.

Finally Marguerite replies:

If I possessed the same as you do, together with the created world you gave me—if in this way, sire, I would be equal to you … since you would wish, unconditionally, these three things that are so grievous for me to bear and to grant … I would wish them, and never wish for anything again. And so, sire, my will takes leave in saying this. And because of this my will is a martyr and my love a martyr: you have brought them to martyrdom …

Thereupon the Land of Freedom showed itself. There Justice came to me, who asked me in what way I wanted her to spare me. And I answered … in no way. Then Mercy came after her, who asked me what help I wanted from her, and I answered … I wanted no more help. … Then Love came after me, filled with goodness, Love who had so often driven me mad and at last killed me … and she said:

Beloved, what do you want of me?
I contain all that was, and that is, and
                                                                                                    that shall be,
I am filled with the all.
Take of me all you please—
if you want all of myself,
                                                                                          I'll not say no.
Tell me, beloved, what you want of me—
I am Love, who am filled with the all:
what you want,
we want, beloved—
tell us your desire nakedly.

At its climax the scene is transmuted into lyric, the echoing lines setting up a movement as of a serene dance.

In this same period, some of the unlettered women around Montaillou show impulses of intuitive scepticism—about life after death, about the presence of God in the host, even about God's existence—and these have strange analogues, in another register, in the moments of mystic nihilism that pervade Marguerite's Miroir:

This soul, said Love, does not take account of shame or honour, of poverty or riches, ease or unease, love or hate, hell or paradise.. If anyone were to ask such free souls … if they would wish to be in paradise, they would say no. Besides, with what would they wish it? They have no will at all, and if they were to wish for anything, that would mean severing themselves from Love … For that one all alone is my God of whom one cannot utter a word, of whom all those in paradise cannot attain a single atom, no matter how much knowledge they have of him … And so I say, and it is truth, that one can give me nothing, nothing that could be. … Ah what a sweet insight this is! In God's name, understand it fully, for paradise is nothing other than this understanding.

Clearly Marguerite was familiar with the Dionysian paradoxes of the unknown God, especially the ‘hymn of Hierotheus’ in the Divine Names, just as she was familiar with the Pauline paradox, ‘having nothing and possessing all things’. Yet she seems to stretch both the objective and the subjective paradox—the divine nothingness, and the sense of finding perfect bliss in emptiness—with an unmatched intense daring.

For this high insight Marguerite also uses the image of dwelling on the plain of Truth (le plain de Verité), spontaneously rediscovering the image, ἀληθείαs πεδίον, so vital in Plato's Phaedrus, the text of which had not yet been restored to the Latin West. So too, the enigma in Plato's Symposium concerning the birth of Love—child of the god Plenty and the goddess Poverty, Love who like his mother is always needy, always in distress, finds an historically mysterious parallel in Marguerite's most astonishing argument for the coincidence of all and nothing, good and evil, and (within herself) endless plenty and endless neediness. Here she not merely flings down the paradoxes but seems to delight in demonstrating them, in a sublime parody of dialectic method:

God has nowhere to put his goodness, if not in me … no place to put himself entire, if not in me. And by this means I am the exemplar of salvation, and what is more, I am the salvation itself of every creature, and the glory of God. … For I am the sum of all evils. For if of my own nature I contain what is evil, then I am all evil. … Now if I am all evil, and he is all goodness, and one must give alms to the poorest being, or else one takes away what is hers by right, and God can do no wrong, for otherwise he would undo himself—then I am his goodness, because of my neediness … I need to have the whole of his goodness, that my evil may be staunched: my poverty cannot make do with less. And his goodness, being powerful and prevailing, could not endure my begging, and I would perforce have to beg if he did not give me all his goodness … So it is clearly evident that I am the praise of God forever, and the salvation of human creatures—for the salvation of any creature is nothing but knowing the goodness of God. … Nor can I ever lose his goodness, since I can never lose my evil.

In the Miroir, the erotically described adventures with Lady Amour and with God, and the mysteries of nothingness, are bridged at times by pieces of deliberate sustained fabling on Marguerite's part. A striking instance, and one that especially shocked many churchmen in her day (as the Latin list of thirty censured passages from her work makes plain), is the dramatic scene she invents where the loving soul bids farewell to the virtues. If the soul is wholly caught up in love, then she is all one with God—or, Marguerite would equally say, she is annihilated in the divine nothingness. Then the virtues of the Christian spirit seem to that soul like shadowy forms from a past life, forms that can be dismissed, because now they could only disturb the experience of oneness. Thus when Love declares that the soul ‘can tell the Virtues that she has been a long time and many a day in their service’, she replies—and her answer, mounting in intensity as well as calm, turns from speech into song—

I admit it, Lady Love: there was a time when I was bound to them, but now is another time—your courtly grace has freed me from serving them. So now I can indeed say and sing to them:

Virtues, I take leave of you for evermore:
I'll have a freer heart for that—more joyful, too.
Your service is too unremitting—indeed I know.
For a time I set my heart on you inseverably,
you know that to you I was surrendered totally;
so I used to be your slave—now I am free …
I suffered many a torment thus, bore many a pain:
it is a marvel second to none that I escaped alive.
Yet since it is so, I am unconcerned: I am severed from you,
for which I thank the God on high—the day is good to me …
I have quit your tyrannies; now I am at peace.

Allied to this fantasy—or we might say, projecting it into another, social dimension—is the myth of Holy Church the Little and Holy Church the Great. Here Marguerite is developing in her own way ideas that had long been in the air, ideas that first received a truly memorable embodiment in the late twelfth century, with Joachim of Fiore's projection of Ecclesia spiritualis. Marguerite's greater church, or church of the spirit, is, like Joachim's, the ideal assembly of free souls, divinely loving and hence united in God. Yet what she stresses more than Joachim, and what gives her fabling about the two churches a particular edge of daring, or even hubris, is her sense that the greater church judges and overrides the lesser, which is the empirical Christian assembly on earth. In Joachim, we might say, the lesser church is superseded by the greater, but in the sense of being transformed into it. There is an historical succession: the age of the Son passes into that of the Spirit, which becomes the age of freedom, of Ecclesia spiritualis. For Marguerite, it is more as if in history the two churches co-exist, and the ideal one must measure and correct the claims of the actual.

Where is that ideal assembly to be found?—

… few people know where such souls are, but there must be some, through the just goodness of Love, to uphold the faith of Holy Church …

Oh Holy Trinity, said Faith, Hope and Charity, where are such soaring souls as those of which this book tells? Who are they, where are they, what do they do? Teach us this through Lady Love, who knows all things—then those who are shocked at hearing this book will be pacified. For Holy Church, if she heard it read, would be amazed at it …

True, said Love, Holy Church the Little would be, she who is governed by Reason; but never Holy Church the Great, who is governed by us. …

Now tell me, said Love to the three divine virtues, why do you ask who these souls are, and where, and what they do? Without fail, if you don't know, then nothing God has created could ever find them. Where they are, all three of you know, for you are with them in all their movements in time, for you three ennoble them. And what they do, you also know. But who they are—to speak of their value and their dignity—neither you know nor they themselves. Thus Holy Church cannot know.

Speaking of the free souls, Lady Love asks almost scornfully:

How could Holy Church know these queens, these royal daughters, sisters and brides of the King? Holy Church could know them perfectly only if she were in their souls. And nothing created enters into their souls—only God, who created those souls, is there. So none can know such souls save God, who is inside them.

Gradually it becomes clear that what Marguerite envisions is an élite of divine love. Just as poets of human love had set their hopes in a small ideal group of ‘noble hearts’ (Gottfried's edele herzen, Guido Guinizelli's cuori gentili), so Marguerite sets hers in this invisible church which for her surpasses the visible and is the veritable one:

You Holy Church beneath this Holy Church, said Love, truly such souls are properly called ‘Holy Church’, for they sustain and teach and nourish all of Holy Church—never they themselves, said Love, but the whole Trinity in their midst …

Oh Holy Church beneath this Holy Church, said Love, what will you say of these souls … ?

We want to say, said Holy Church the Little, that such souls are above us in life, for Love dwells in them and Reason dwells in us.

The myth of this aristocracy of love is even exploited symbolically in its social connotations:

This soul has its share of refined nobility … She replies to none if she does not wish to, if he is not of her lineage: for a nobleman would not deign to reply to a churl if the churl challenged him …

But Marguerite (who in prison did not deign to reply to her inquisitors) is herself a challenger. The antinomy between Love and Reason—the life-force of the invisible church against that of the lesser, visible one—is present from the outset of her work. In the lyrical prologue, she enters the lists as Love's champion against Reason:

Theologians and other clerks,
you won't understand this book
—however bright your wits—
if you do not meet it humbly,
and in this way Love and Faith
make you surmount Reason:
they are the mistresses of Reason's house.(2)
Reason herself proclaims to us
in the thirteenth chapter
of this book, unashamed,
that Love and Faith make her live:
she never frees herself from them—
they have sovereignty over her,
and she must do obeisance.
So bring low your sciences
which are founded by Reason,
and put all your trust
in the sciences conferred by Love,
that are lit up by Faith—
and then you'll understand this book,
which by Love makes the soul live.

There is even a fantasy, in the course of the work, in which the soul and Lady Love watch Reason die. Only when Reason is dead does Love begin to take her rival's part. St. Paul had championed a wisdom that is foolishness to the heathen, and an ideal of caritas that transcends all knowledge and all faith. Again, the surmounting of reason by love is a familiar element in many moments of the Christian mystical tradition. Nonetheless, Marguerite's formulations have a polemical edge that makes them distinctive. She is not thinking primarily of St. Paul or St. Bernard, but rather of what she sees—admittedly without nuance or specific detail—as the limitations of the Parisian Scholastics of her own day.

Marguerite's spiritual eroticism and nihilism, and her myth-making in the spiritual realm, all lead us to the existential question: did she understand herself as one of the free souls? The answer is not easy or unequivocal. I would signal especially two moments early in the book that have a bearing on it. At one moment Amour claims that the free soul is so absorbed in love of God that it would not even notice the needs of its neighbours, could not even imagine that all might not be well with them:

Yet if this soul, who is set so high, could help her neighbours, she would help them in their need with all her power. But the thoughts of such souls are so divine that they never pause to such an extent among passing or created things that they might conceive of any unease in them, since God is, beyond comprehension, good.

A moment later, this notion of sovereign indifference towards fellow-beings is modified:

If such souls possessed anything, and they knew that others might have greater need of it than they, such souls would never keep it back, even if they were certain that bread and corn and other sustenance would never grow again on earth.

Here, notwithstanding her affirmation of a God good beyond comprehension, Marguerite shows she is aware of such things as human neediness and hunger. There seems to be a touching naiveness about her formulation—for how would a ‘free’ soul know even of such possibilities save by concerning herself affectionately with ‘passing and created things’, and ‘conceiving of unease’ in them? Is the implication, then, that Marguerite, who does understand this, has no claim to be a free soul? Later on that page we read:

Whoever it may be who speaks of God, as much as he wants and to whom he wants and wherever he wants to speak, must in no way doubt but must know beyond any doubt, said this [free] soul, that he has never experienced the true kernel of divine love.

This could be taken as Marguerite's manifest self-disqualification. Yet would that mean that she, who devotes a whole book to speaking of her unfathomable God, and of joining him in a love-union that is also a leap into the unfathomable, is simply writing wildly of what she has not experienced? Rather, she is like the princess in her first fable, experiencing her love of the never-seen Alexander by means of the portrait she conceives, which is simply a picture of the way she loves him and longs for him. As a writer, Marguerite is making the blind leap of creating the free soul, the loved ideal; in a similar way, she imagines the free souls making a blind leap, into the loved nothingness.

At the same time, we might see another possibility: that it is not Marguerite herself who is telling of God. The motive for her putting almost everything in her book in the mouths of projections—the free soul, Lady Love, Reason, Holy Church the Little, and the rest—might be to intimate that it is not she who is speaking; and this would leave open the possibility that she is, or is becoming, the free soul she aspires to be.

In her opening poetic prologue Marguerite had declared the need to approach her book with humility; on the other hand, she often invests her personifications with a heady arrogance which it is hard to dissociate entirely from her, the individual imagination behind these projections. The impassioned and at times soaring quality of her work is inseparable from her conviction that she personally has found a ‘plain of truth’ inaccessible to the wise and powerful who propound truths in the visible church. Where Hildegard saw the lux vivens as the supremely objective reality, which visited her and showed her truths, and hence never presented that light as being her own, Marguerite's projection of free souls was a subjective challenge—to portray for herself the image that she did not know, the image she could never know for sure to be more than her own infatuated illusion; but equally it was an objective challenge, flung at the ‘Little Church’ of her time. Thus the close of the Miroir (in its first version) is a blend of lyric epithalamium of divine love and topical polemic, such as medieval poetry had not known before. The Trinity implores the soul to guard her secrets:

I beg you, dear daughter, let be:
no cleric in the world is great enough
to speak with you of this …
I beg you, dear daughter,
my sister and my beloved,
in Love's name, if you will,
do not wish to say more
about the secrets
that you know:
by these others would damn themselves,
there where you will be saved,
since Reason and Desire rule them,
and Fear and Will.
But know, my chosen daughter,
that the others are granted paradise.
Paradise? said the chosen one—
you do not give them something different?
Then murderers shall as easily have it,
if they will cry mercy!
Nonetheless
I'll say no more of this,
since you wish it so.

With these words, the soul resolves to begin her ‘farewell song of Fine Amour’. After a brief transition, the cycle of lyrical farewell opens, with the rondeau:

Thinking is no more use to me,
nor work, nor verbal skill:
Love draws me up so loftily
—thinking is no more use to me—
with her godlike glances,
that I've no other goal.
Thinking is no more use to me,
nor work, nor verbal skill.

Then come renewed praises of the divine Amis—but soon among these a note of challenge is heard again:

Beloved, what will béguines say, and the pious throng,
when they hear the excellence of your divine song?
Béguines say that I am wrong, priest and clerk and preacher,
Austins and Carmelites and the Friars Minor,
wrong in writing of the being of this noble Love.
I am not—no slight to their reason, that makes them tell me this
surely Desire, Will and Fear rob them of cognizance, rob them of the flood
and union of the highest light of the ardour of the divine Love.

The concluding lyric, limpid and concentrated, suggests that, in the subjective abnegation, the objective reality of the divine beloved has been found, and that with this all exacerbation is resolved in serene absorption:

I've said that I will love him—
I lie, it is not I:
it's he alone who loves me—
he is, and I am naught.
And I need nothing
save what he wills
and that he prevails.
He is fullness
and with this I am filled:
this is the divine kernel
and loyal love.

The last words allude to the moment where Marguerite had discounted herself as a free soul. By speaking of God at all she showed herself to be one ‘who has never experienced the true kernel of divine love’. But her book is also her portrait of Alexander: by painting the way she loved him, the loving woman dreamt the king himself.

Notes

1. W. Erzgraber, ed. Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft VIII: Europäisches Spätmittelalter. (Wiesbaden: Athenaion 1978), p. 589.

2. I translate the MS reading of this line (fol. 6r): Qui dames sont de sa maison (de la maison Guarnieri).

This paper is based on extracts from the final chapter of my book, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: From Perpetua to Marguerite Porete. (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming), where full documentation is given. The passages here translated from Marguerite's Miroir are based on a fresh collation of the MS Chantilly Condé F xiv 26. R. Guarnieri's edition, in Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà 4 (1965), 501-635, has also been consulted throughout.