(2025)
Le Mirouer is a nod to the French-speaking Beguine mystic, Marguerite Porete. Born in Hainaut, Belgium in 1250, her work would later inform the Christian movement called the “Heresy of the Free Spirit”, with most known biographical information about her life coming from her Inquisition trial of 1310 in Place de Grève, Paris, Kingdom of France (the Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville, today). While her history is clearly distorted, it is understood that her most famous publication, Le Mirouer des simples âmes anienties et qui seulement demeurent en vouloir et désir d’amour (trans. The Mirror of Simple Souls annihilated, and who only remain in want and desire for love), was first compiled in the 1290s, receiving a declaration of heretical content, to some extent, by the Bishop of Cambrai.
The Bishop condemned the text to a public burning.
In the early 1300s, she was possibly arrested in Châlons-en-Champagne, with the story suggesting she had passed her book along to a local bishop. She was promptly handed over to the Dominican Inquisitor, William of Paris on the grounds of heresy, leading to her martydom, burning at the stake in June of 1310. Notably, her final words were never recorded, though the legend suggests she simply smiled in the flames.
“It is not easy to establish exactly why Porete was condemned as a heretic. The Mirror of Simple Souls, written in a vivid literary style in Old French, is a dialogue among the allegorical figures of Love, Reason and the Soul. The main challenge it poses to Catholic orthodoxy is in its claim that there is a state of mystical union in which the will completely loses itself in God so that it becomes undifferentiated and one with the divine. Catholic doctrine has tended to resist such claims, but they are found in the writings of other mystics and devotional figures such as Meister Eckhart and Catherine of Siena who did not suffer Porete’s fate (although Eckhart too was charged with heresy).
Porete’s martyrdom can probably be attributed to a number of factors, not least of which is the threat that independent women pose to male-dominated religious hierarchies. She may also have been the victim of a complex interweaving of political and religious rivalries – in this case between the French monarchy and the papacy, at a time when Philip IV was trying to establish himself as a defender of the Catholic faith.”
Tina Beattie 2010,
Porete, a forgotten female voice
** midi audio only, set for premier in 2026 **
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