Allegories of Love in Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls (review)

Marguerite Porete was burned in Paris in 1310, presumably for composing the Mirror of Simple Souls, an allegorical account of the soul's journey toward divine union. But whether Porete indeed was executed because of this multi-genre theological treatise is not entirely clear. As Suzanne Kocher explains, getting oneself burnt at the stake was not easy in France in 1310, and the fact that Porete managed to do so probably says more about her personality and Philip the Fair's obsessive need to prove himself orthodox in the wake of his despoliation of the Templars than it says about the work's heretical content. However, Kocher's goal is not to evaluate whether Porete's text was heretical - she understands heresy to be an element of reception - but to analyse it as a 'three-dimensional structure that constantly and explicitly extends outward from the allegory towards the readers and their world' (p. 13). Arguing that the allegory of the work represents collective human psychology (it is not 'purely individual in scope. In Porete's text the personified psychological faculties are each less than whole people, but together they represent human minds collectively,' (p. 13)), Kocher takes us through the ways in which the Soul, after much effort, finally realizes the gift of union.

In a long opening chapter, Kocher discusses how the work may have been performed. She explains that Marguerite, arrested in Valenciennes, was ordered to desist from reading her book aloud. Because the Mirror would have taken roughly seven hours to read, Marguerite may have constructed it deliberately in 'brief idea-cycles' or sound bites, to give listeners passing through the main ideas. Kocher then considers sources for the Mirror. These include, among others, contemporary lyric poetry (Valenciennes held a puy), Roman de la rose, Chrétien de Troyes's Knight of the Cart, Gérard of Liège's Quinque incitamenta, Beatrice of Nazareth, and Hadewijch of Antwerp. She further suggests that Marguerite's 'Little Holy Church' may derive from the visual convention in manuscript illustration of donors holding a tiny church (p. 58).

Chapters 2 through 7 consider the wealth of allegorical figures and relations through which Porete describes the Soul's movement toward God. In what follows, I can only give a hint of the fullness and interest of Kocher's discussion. 'Gender in the Religious Allegory of Love: From Active Woman to Passive Souls', argues that Porete's most frequent way of approaching the relationship between the Soul and God is through allegories of romantic love, running the entire gamut of gender combinations. At different times, the Soul is represented as the female and male lover of a male and female beloved. The other allegorical characters shift genders as well. She concludes that although the Soul's journey is spiritual rather than physical, gender remains an important mode for representing relations unrelated to the physical body.

Chapter 3, 'From Spiritual Servitude to Freedom: The Allegory of Social Rank', analyses Porete's allegories of social rank, showing that the phenomenon is represented as a series of stages through which one can pass, much more easily than in real life, where status was rigid. Especially interesting is Kocher's discussion of the Soul's serfdom. The Soul labours, which requires her self-will, the very opposite of the spiritual passivity that Porete describes as the figure's final goal.

In the fourth chapter, 'Wealth, Poverty, and the Allegory of Economic Exchange', Kocher discusses the various valences of wealth and poverty as they appear in the allegories, making clear how fundamentally ambivalent this society was toward money and trade. The Soul is generous, requesting nothing for herself, and yet she is implicated in a system founded upon a search for recompense.

Chapter 5, 'Models of Interpretation; Allegory, Comparisons, and the making of Meaning', proposes that the allegorical figures in the Mirror teach their readers/listeners how to interpret texts. Although the...