A Companion to Marguerite Porete and “The Mirror of Simple Souls.” Wendy R. Terry and Robert Stauffer, eds. Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 77. Leiden: Brill, 2017. x + 384 pp. $253.

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 1526-1527
Author(s):  
Robert E. Lerner
Keyword(s):  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Marguerite Porete ◽  
Mirror Of Simple Souls

Annihilation and Deification in Beguine Theology and Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls

2010 ◽  
Vol 103 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Marin
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Moral Duty ◽  
Original Form ◽  
Religious Women ◽  
Free Spirit ◽  
Marguerite Porete ◽  
Theological Discourse ◽  
Mirror Of Simple Souls ◽  
Disproportionate Number

In 1309 ecclesiastical leaders condemned as heresy Marguerite Porete's rejection of moral duty, her doctrine that “the annihilated soul is freed from the virtues.”1 They also condemned her book, the Mirror of Simple Souls, which includes doctrines associated decades earlier with a “new spirit” heresy spreading “blasphemies” such as that “a person can become God” because “a soul united to God is made divine.”2 In his study, The Heresy of the Free Spirit, Robert E. Lerner identifies these two doctrines of annihilation and deification as characteristic of the “free spirit” heresy condemned at the 1311 Council of Vienne. The council claimed that this heresy's sympathizers belonged to an “abominable sect of certain evil men known as beghards and some faithless women called beguines.”3 Lerner found that this group was composed of a disproportionate number of women, including Marguerite Porete. Many of the men were also involved with the group of pious laywomen known as beguines.4 Lerner shows that among those charged with heresy, many sympathized with a “ ‘free-spirit style’ of affective mysticism particularly congenial to thirteenth century religious women.”5 He suggests that beguines in particular radicalized affective spirituality into what he calls an “extreme mysticism.”6 Here I wish to follow Lerner's suggestion that we ought to search for the roots of Porete's doctrines among the beguines. I will argue that distinctive doctrines of annihilation and deification sprouted from a fertile beguine imagination, one that nourished Porete's own distinctive and influential ideas in the Mirror of Simple Souls.7 It is among the beguines that we find the first instance in Christianity of a women's community creating an original form of theological discourse.

Marguerite Porete and Godfrey of Fontaines

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter King
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Theory ◽  
Right Action ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
The Third ◽  
Marguerite Porete ◽  
Mirror Of Simple Souls ◽  
The Will

This paper argues that Marguerite Porete asked Godfrey of Fontaines to endorse her book, The Mirror of Simple Souls, because they shared three views in common. The first view is that the will is only contingently connected to the intellect and can be detached from it. The second view is that the traditional moral virtues are neither necessary nor sufficient for right action. The third view is that love has the power to literally transform one’s self. The first is unique to Godfrey, the second part of a shift in the medieval understanding of the role of virtue in ethical theory, and the third in many respects is a commonplace. Marguerite’s choice of Godfrey to sanction her treatise was therefore well motivated on doctrinal, not merely political, grounds.

FLUIDITY IN STILLNESS: A READING OF HADEWIJCH'S STROFISCHE GEDICHTEN/POEMS IN STANZAS

Traditio ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 73 ◽  
pp. 179-211
Author(s):  
ANITA MIR
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Dynamic Structure ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Gender Perspective ◽  
Religious Women ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Marguerite Porete ◽  
Non Linear ◽  
Dutch Language

That women felt and men thought has long been the predominant lens through which medieval Christian writing has been analyzed. The work of the religious women vernacular theologians, or Beguines, who emerged across North Europe from the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries has therefore often been dismissed as affective mysticism. Recent scholarship has begun to re-appraise this work and re-evaluate its place within the Christian tradition. This paper looks at the work of Hadewijch, a thirteenth-century mystical poet from Brabant in the Netherlands who, though less well known than other Beguines such as Hildegaard of Bingen and Marguerite Porete, may, as John Arblaster and Paul Verdeyen argue, “rightly be called the greatest poetic genius in the Dutch language.” It is probable that her work was not widely known during her lifetime (not, that is, directly), but research is strengthening the argument that her theology was transmitted via the works of John of Ruusbroec. This paper will attend both to Hadewijch's poesy and her theology and ask what the dynamic structure in her verse — its shifts of perspective, gender perspective, and non-linear narrative — might lead us to grasp about her theology.

Christological Transformation in The Mirror of Souls, by Marguerite Porete

2003 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen L. Babinsky
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Marguerite Porete ◽  
Mirror Of Simple Souls

This essay explores Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls, which offers a powerful portrayal of the soul's transformation into her exemplar, Jesus Christ. First, it outlines Porete's portrayal of the trinitarian relation of the faculties of the soul. Next, it explores the contours of the christological themes of the transformation of the soul. Finally, it shows that the goal of the text itself is the reader's transformation. Porete's designation of Jesus Christ as exemplar highlights the energy that drives the soul's transformation and constitutes the transforming nature of the text.

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