Wendy R. Terry and Robert Stauffer, eds., A Companion to Marguerite Porete and “The Mirror of Simple Souls”. (Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 77.) Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017. Pp. viii, 383; 3 color and 1 black-and-white figures. $253. ISBN: 978-90-04-22621-0.Table of contents available online at https://brill.com/view/title/21417

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.

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Marguerite Porete and Godfrey of Fontaines

10.1093/oso/9780198827030.003.0006 ◽

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.

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