ABSTRACT
Marguerite Porete was a late thirteenth-century béguine from Hainault in Flanders (béguines were laywomen vowed to chastity who were self-supporting and led a disciplined life, either at home, in convents or in béguinages, i.e. settlements or special areas within a town). Some time between 1296 and 1306 she wrote a lengthy and obscure mystical treatise in Old French, Le Mirouer des Simples Ames, a dialogue between Lady Love, Lady Reason and the Free Soul, which was condemned by the local bishop as heretical and publicly burnt. The bishop considered that Marguerite’s book was associated with the heresy of the Free Spirit, a loosely organised Continental movement whose adherents (many of them women) taught that Free Spirits, i.e. advanced and favoured souls whose wills were united with the Divine, no longer needed to observe the moral law or avail themselves of the Church and the sacraments (see Lerner 1972). In spite of this condemnation, Marguerite Porete continued to circulate copies of Le Mirouer and seek approval from theologians of its orthodoxy. She was therefore arrested by the Inquisition, brought to Paris and imprisoned. In 1309 fifteen suspect articles extracted from Le Mirouer were examined and condemned by twenty-one prominent Paris theologians. In 1310 she was condemned by the Inquisition as a relapsed heretic and burnt at the stake, having refused to speak in her own defence (see Verdeyen 1986: 47–94).
