ABSTRACT
Burned at the stake a full century before Joan of Arc, Marguerite Porete makes a challenging subject for contemporary appropriation. Some time in the late thirteenth century, Marguerite wrote a mystical treatise with the deceptively simple title, Le mirour des simples âmes, “The Mirror of Simple Souls.” But the text was not linked to its author until the twentieth century. Marguerite’s refusal to recant her seemingly heretical doctrines got her the dubious distinction of being the first person burned as a relapsed heretic by the Paris Inquisition in 1310. Despite her distance from us in time, there is much to recommend her as a peculiarly postmodern saint. At the time Marguerite was executed, the institutional church was enjoying its heyday of scholasticism. Yet, Marguerite called it the “Little Church” because it failed to embody the simplicity and surrender of those lovers totally dedicated to God in the truly “Great Church.” The courage and integrity she showed in her willingness to face her condemnation for eighteen months without a word of self-defense correspond to the defiant break her mystical treatise makes with those (male) inquisitors who represented the institutional church. Her life was of a piece with her work, a mirror of The Mirror.
