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27  CH A P T E R TW O  T H E “BE G U I N E CL E R G E R E S S E ” A N D HE R MI R R O R The execution of Marguerite Porete on June 1, 1310, is the earliest recorded death sentence for mystical heresy in Western Christianity. For Porete, that day was the culmination of years of struggle against authority. Ecclesiastical officials had learned of the suspect doctrines espoused in the Mirror by 1306, when the Bishop of Cambrai ordered the book burned publicly in Porete’s presence and issued a stern warning to her to cease circulating her ideas or writings.1 She ignored his reprimand. Two years later, Philip of Marigny, the new Bishop of Cambrai, accused her of giving her book to another bishop as well as of teaching her views to uneducated folk. Local inquisitorial judges sent Porete to appear before the Dominican Inquisitor in Paris, where Porete and a loyal supporter were jailed for eighteen months. During this time she refused to respond to her inquisitors’ questions.2 The Inquisitor, William Humbert, then presented fifteen articles excerpted out of the context of her book to a panel of twenty-one regents from the University of Paris. They summarily declared Porete a relapsed heretic, and they turned her over to secular authorities on May 31, 1310. She was burned at the stake a day later in the Place de Grève in Paris.3 Who was this woman? We know very little about the author of the Mirror of Simple Souls beyond evidence within the text and the documents relating to her trial and condemnation.4 And this scant evidence is largely skewed and biased. Many of the sources that have survived were hostile to Porete, and she is predictably hostile to her detractors within her text. Although we know far more about what Porete taught than about who she was, a brief historical synopsis can help to reconstruct her likely circumstances as well as outline key issues within the text itself.5 A brief review of the categorizations into which Porete has been placed—and into which she fits only loosely—seems to justify Bernard McGinn’s inventive designation: Porete, along with Angela of Foligno, Hadewijch of Antwerp, and Mechtild of Magdeburg, is one of the “four female Evangelists” whose work deserves careful and respectful consideration in the history of mysticism.6 As explained in the Introduction, this investigation generally avoids questions of heresy, which have been covered fully and continue to be explored by other scholars.7 Others have also looked more closely at her apophatic mystical language and other aspects of her theological ideas.8 It is also not centrally concerned with questions commonly associated with what has become known as feminist discourse.9 This is not “women’s history” in any other way than it focuses on a writer who was a woman who lived a religious life outside the structure of monastic life; who was well educated and inclined toward mystical speculation; and who stirred up controversy with a stubbornness found only rarely among her contemporaries. It is more properly categorized as an interpretive exploration of a distinctive mode of spirituality. It casts Porete as a representative of what Bernard McGinn has termed the “new mysticism” that arose in the thirteenth century, particularly in the realm of “new forms of language and modes of representation of mystical consciousness.”10 That Porete lived a life outside the established orders is clear both in her Mirror and in trial documents, which refer to Porete as a beguine, a “beguine clergeresse,” or a “pseudo-mulier.”11 These appellations may or may not be accurate: certainly the charge that Porete was a “pseudo-mulier” comes from a hostile source. It must be remembered, too, that many of the sources that do survive are hostile toward the women whose condemnations they record.12 Inquisitor’s condemnations, papal directives, and the pejorative writings of churchmen cannot be relied upon to tell us much about the “real” life of heretical beguines in this period. This is reflected in unsupported accusations by modern scholars. Ernest McDonnell, for instance, proposes a category of “petty heresiarchs of the Marguerite Porete type” in The Beguines and the Beghards. He writes that Margaret no longer belonged to the church-schooled, orthodox beguines of Belgium and northern France from whom she could very well have come as a native of Hainaut. She...

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