ABSTRACT
I first read The Mirror of Simple Souls as a Cambridge graduate student, in the only printed form then available, a modernization by Clare Kirchberger of the version in Middle English.1 The English writer, identified only as ‘M.N.’, states in his first sentence that he translated it from French with some trepidation, because it was full of elevated theological matters and spiritual experiences and was very obscurely expressed – so much so that, his first attempt having led to misunderstandings, he reworked it, adding glosses of his own. M.N. shows no sign of knowing who was responsible for his fascinating and yet dangerously difficult source, not even whether it was by a man or a woman; nor did Kirchberger know. I read it because I was working on a dissertation on Piers Plowman, and was studying prose devotional writings to see if they provided any analogies for the distinctive structure and method of proceeding of Langland’s poem. I was indeed struck by a certain similarity between these two very different allegorical fictions: both seemed to move forward not directly and systematically but in a loose spiralling motion, repeatedly returning to glimpse the same themes from different angles. An unexpected insight – but I saw no way of using it, and in the end I let it slip. I was unaware that in 1946 the French text had been identified2 as a book by Marguerite Porete which had been condemned as heretical and had led to her being burned at the stake in 1310 – ‘the first documented case of an execution for mystical heresy in Western Christianity’.3 Porete’s book was also supposed to be burned, but copies survived, and, though only one French manuscript is now available, dating from nearly two centuries after the original, the Mirror was translated into Latin and Italian as well as Middle English, and survives in all those languages. Since Guarnieri announced her discovery in, of all places, the official Vatican newspaper, I and my Cambridge teachers could perhaps be excused for not knowing about it. Subsequently she published the French text,4 and Marilyn Doiron published the Middle English Mirror of Simple Souls.5 That I should have known about, even though the place of publication was this time the Archivio Italiano per la Storía della Pietà, an unexpected home for a Middle English text. But by then I had abandoned the dissertation, and it was only recently that I came back to the Mirror by way of studies of Julian of Norwich and The Cloud of Unknowing for translations that my wife and I were commissioned to make for Penguin
Classics.6 Subsequently my wife contracted to produce another Penguin Classic called Medieval Writings on Female Spirituality,7 intended, as far as possible, to represent those writings as they were available in medieval England. For this, at her request, I translated selections from the Middle English Mirror of Simple Souls into modern English. In doing so I found myself newly fascinated by the Mirror. Whether or not it was rightly condemned as heretical, it is certainly a work of extremely advanced mysticism. One index of this is something that makes its status in the present volume seem precarious: it scarcely distinguishes between heaven as a state of being after death and the ‘land of freedom’ (p.154) achievable in this life by total submission of the will to God. Yet the Mirror was read in both English and Latin in England, where the religious climate was supposedly so conservative. One of the three manuscripts (all of Carthusian provenance) containing the English Mirror also includes the only surviving copy of the Short Text of Julian of Norwich; and a Latin version of the Mirror by the Carthusian Richard Methley exists alongside his Latin translation of The Cloud of Unknowing. The latter juxtaposition is of special interest, bringing together two works of Christian mysticism in which the incarnation plays a startlingly small part, one (the Cloud) concerned with the language and logic of the via negativa and the other (the Mirror) with its phenomenology. The manuscript situation suggests an unexpectedly keen English interest in the more adventurous forms of spirituality, and at the same time a continuity between those and more mainstream mystical writings. It may also suggest that we should not be too ready to interpret Julian and the Cloud author entirely in terms of cautious orthodoxy.
