The Mirror Of Simple Souls By Marguerite Porete

Marguerite Porete’s Mirouer des simples ames, also known as “The Mirror of Simple Souls”, dating from the 1290s, is a remarkable text by any standards. It is the oldest known mystical text written in French and the only surviving text written by a woman convicted of heresy. Marguerite’s work is a complex piece of literature given that it was written in an era in which many people were not educated. Her use of literary discourse illustrates the sophistication with which she presents her information and ideas, aiding in her persuasive rhetoric. Moreover, her book does more than challenge the ideals and beliefs of the Catholic Orthodoxy which was a feat in and of itself, it is also subliminally challenging the balance of power between men and

Natives who had settled in France long before others expanded into the new world, were able to read and pass along Marguerite’s knowledge of an invisible, ideal church in the spiritual world made up of "free and simple souls" who were called to judge the "little church" that was established on Earth. She had a habit of traveling around Europe, preaching and disseminating pamphlets of excerpts from her book, The Mirror of Simple Souls, and condemning the excesses of the clergy. However, it was the people who kept her ideals circulating in a language that the Catholic Orthodoxy was unable to decipher that posed the threat. Kocher states, “Porete has a flair for maximizing the literary freedom of her genre, carrying an analogy to the point just before it breaks down’, and developing ‘allegory’s rich polyvalence to create a new textual space for arranging and rearranging ideas” (p. 172). More than just words or heresy; her writing emotionally appealed to people, which is what made it so powerful. Marguerite

Thus, it aims to pick up where treaties like the Meditations on the life of Christ end. She places the conception and execution of the work in the lap of ‘Love’ who explains that she alone has created the book for: ‘You little ones of Holy Church’ so that you might hear in order to be more worthy of the perfection of life and the being of peace to which the creature is able to arrive through the virtue of perfect charity, and the gift given by the whole Trinity’. In other words, the purpose of the book is to teach souls who are not ‘pure’ (purs), ‘perfect’ (affines) and ‘free’ (franchix) about the possibility of ‘perfect charity’ (parfaicte charite´) and ‘the gift given by the whole Trinity’ (le don est donne´ de toute la Trinite´). It does not claim to make them perfect, or even to document the perfection of the book’s human author. Rather, it seeks to teach these souls about the perfect, and, in doing so, give them a set of spiritual teachings that will show them how to progress beyond meditations that focus upon the historical or literal sense of key people and events in the gospels in order to glean their mystical