Marguerite Porete: Mystic, Writer, Martyr

Marguerite Porete (executed 1 June 1310)

About Marguerite Porete, theologian and historian Bernard McGinn writes, "No medieval woman mystic challenged her contemporaries--and still challenges us--more than the northern French beguine Marguerite Porete," whose "bold and uncompromising spirituality led to her execution as a heretic on June 1, 1310."

From a late-fifteenth or early-sixteenth manuscript copy
of The Mirror for Simple Souls
(Chantilly, Bibliothèque et archives du château, MS 5588)

We know about the end of Porete's life because records of the heresy trial that condemned her to death survive, but about her origins there is much less that is certain. Even her name depends on the testimony of those who condemned her--as her sentence was read out by one of her Dominican inquisitors before she was released to the secular authorities to carry out her execution, he named her as Marguerite, "called Porete." She was also said to have been born in Hainaut, in northern France, but none of the surviving evidence gave any indication about her date of birth or her family connections.

Marguerite Porete had been imprisoned in Paris for a year and a half. She had refused to speak to her inquisitors, she had refused to recant her beliefs, and she had refused to acknowledge a previous order, issued in 1306, that had required her to withdraw her book, The Mirror of Simple Souls. 

Like two women we have already met in our posts for this year, Marie of Oignies and Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite seems to have been a part of the beguine movement--some beguines lived solitary lives, while others joined together into loosely organized religious communities of women who lived lives of poverty, chastity, and service, but who were not members of formally recognized religious orders. Marguerite refers to herself at one point as "formerly a mendicant creature," so she may have lived outside of any beguine community.

Another image from the 
Chantilly copy MS

Exactly why Porete's work brought her to the attention of the authorities isn't at all clear--after the 1306 order that her book be burned, she had sent her book to three noted theologians who had verified the orthodoxy of her views in The Mirror of Simple Souls. 

As she asserts in the prologue to her work, "It has already been read and approved by three men of learning and holiness": a Franciscan friar, a Cistercian monk, and a theologian from the University of Paris. She names them, quotes from their judgments of her work, and adds, "I obtained these approbations for you, readers, for your peace of mind."

But these endorsements were clearly not enough. The way of life practiced by the beguines--their asceticism, their refusal to marry, their independence, their traveling, their insistence on preaching and teaching--had always generated suspicion.

Most significantly, whether they chose an itinerant, solitary life or a life among other like-minded women in communities, they had avoided all of the male hierarchical strictures of medieval society. In 1215 and again in 1274, church councils had banned new religious orders for women, and by 1311, the Council of Varenne specifically condemned the beguines and other heresies, its bull Ad nostrum including articles drawn directly from Porete's work.

In her brief essay on Porete, written for The Guardian, theologian Tina Beattie observes that "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. . . .

The fact that The Mirror of Simple Souls was written in the vernacular rather than Latin and had a popular following may have created suspicion among religious authorities. When in the 12th century theological education shifted to the universities from monasteries and abbeys (including some which had been presided over by powerful abbesses), Latin became the language of a male theological elite, but female mystics and vernacular theologians such as Porete claimed direct authority from God for their religious experiences and insights. It is easy to see how such claims threatened those who sought to maintain control of church teaching and doctrine by circumscribing the conditions under which a theologian could speak or write authoritatively.

When Marguerite Porete was burned at the stake, her book was burned with her. But, as McGinn notes, The Mirror of Simple Souls survived the conflagration--"no fewer than six versions in four languages with thirteen manuscripts" preserved Porete's words, "making it among the more widely disseminated of the vernacular mystical texts of the Middle Ages."

La Place de Grève, site of Marguerite Porete's execution,
from a map of 1572

While the text survived, Porete's authorship did not--her identity as author was suppressed, and the work circulated anonymously. In fact, Porete's authorship of The Mirror of Simple Souls was only reestablished in 1946 by Romana Guarnieri, a scholar of medieval spirituality (and, I might point out, a woman). Before Guarnieri's identification of the text's author as Marguerite Porete, scholars had assumed the author to be male--and one translator even identified the author as a theologian from the University of Paris!

In ending her essay on Marguerite Porete, Beattie recalls the words of Mechthild of Magdeburg: "No one can burn the truth." Here's the quotation, from The Flowing Light of the Godhead--it sounds remarkably prescient:

I was warned about this book, and people told me that if it were not protected, it could be thrown on the fire. Then I did as I have done since I was a child: whenever I was distressed, then I had to pray. . . . Then God himself at once to my sorrowful soul and held this book in his right hand and said: My love, do not be too distressed, no one may burn the truth.

For a great introduction to Marguerite Porete and her work, you can access Tina Beattie's essay by clicking here. There are several editions of The Mirror for Simple Souls, but I recommend the excellent edition by Ellen Babinsky, a volume in the Classics of Western Spirituality series.

Excellent analysis of The Mirror of Simple Souls is in The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism--1200-1350, volume 2 of McGinn's monumental history of western mysticism. For an in-depth volume on Porete, her text, her trial, and condemnation, see Sean L. Field's The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor: The Trials of Marguerite Porete and Guiard of Cressonessart.

The Blessed Marie of Oignies

Marie of Oignies (1 May 1240)

First, a word about why Marie of Oignies is the topic of today's post. Most of what we know about this remarkable religious woman comes to us from a biography written by the theologian Jacques de Vitry--whose death occurred on 1 May 1240. And so today, on the anniversary of Jacques de Vitry's death, I'm writing about Marie of Oignies.

Reliquary bust of Marie of Oignies,

silver and copper

(Church of Saint-Martin d'Aiseau,

Belgium)

To write about Marie of Oignies on the anniversary of the death of Jacque de Vitry is fitting, I think, because despite her undoubted influence on many religious women who followed, we don't have any information about Marie's family, or about her life, or about her religious experiences, except the details and interpretations that come to us from him. And his biographical work, Vita Mariae Oignacensis, was not written for the many laywomen who found inspiration in her life or who would seek to follow her model. In fact, I've preserved its Latin title here because the work was directed to (and written for) educated religious men so that they could use the details of her life in their own teaching.  

According to Jacques de Vitry's account of her life, Marie was probably born in 1176 or 1177, the daughter of a wealthy family from Nivelles, Belgium. Although she rejected the luxuries of life that her parents provided her and desired a life of poverty, expressing her wish to become a nun, her parents arranged for her marriage when she was fourteen (if she was born in 1176/77, that would date her marriage to 1190/91).

But, at least according to Jacques de Vitry's version of Marie's life, the new bride managed to persuade her new husband to take vows of chastity and poverty with her, and the two moved to a leper hospital in Willambroux, where they devoted themselves to lives of service, used their own money to support the work of the hospital, and earned the criticism of their respective families.

By 1207, Marie de Oignies left her husband and Willambroux, with his approval and consent, for a cell at the Augustinian priory of St. Nicholas at Oignies. There, although not having taken the vows of a nun belonging to any religious order, she lived a life of prayer and poverty. Nevertheless, despite her withdrawal from the world, she earned a reputation in the world for her powers of healing and her extraordinary visionary experiences. 

Perhaps drawn by Marie's reputation, Jacques de Vitry became a canon at the priory in 1209. He was ordained in 1210, probably as a result of Marie's influence, and, more important, became her confessor. He remained with her until her death in 1213, and he composed his Life of Marie Oignies two years later. 

Jacques de Vitry's account of Marie of Oignies was part of a larger project, his Liber de mulieribus Leodiensibus, (Book of the Women of Liège), which Annette Esser describes as "a propaganda effort to gain official ecclesiastical recognition for . . . the Flemish Beguines."*

Marie's religious dedication, as described by Jacques de Vitry, is witnessed by two key elements: her extreme asceticism (her early death is almost certainly due to her extended periods of self-starvation) and her extraordinary visionary experiences.

In her discussion of Marie of Oignies, Esser notes four key visions: "the vision of fiery excess," which occurs right after Marie's marriage; her vision of the life of Christ, which is accompanied by what Jacques de Vitry describes as a "flood of tears"; her "ecstatic vision" of "self-stigmatization," a vision that results in her using a knife to cut out a chunk of her own flesh; and her "vision of hands from purgatory," the result of fasting and endless work, in which she sees and experiences the suffering of souls in Purgatory.

Marie's life--and, in particular, her visionary experiences and her extremes of self-deprivation--would offer inspiration to and become a model for many women who did not have the social status, wealth, or education that would allow them to take up a religious life in a convent.

The interior courtyard of the abbey of St. Nicholas, Oignies,
where relics of Marie of Oignies are preserved

Marie of Oignies died in 1213 and was beatified by the Catholic Church, her feast day celebrated on 23 June. Some sources list 23 June as the day of her death, but I can find no documentation for that information.

There are several affordable paperback editions of the Life of Marie de Oignies. For an introduction to a range of medieval women mystics, I recommend Elizabeth Petroff's Medieval Women's Visionary Literature and her Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism. Annette Esser's essay on Marie of Oignies is in Women Christian Mystics Speak to Our Time, ed. David Brian Perrin.

In her extreme fasting, Marie of Oignies precedes Catherine of Siena, whom we discussed two days ago, by more than a century. Two works I suggested there, Rudolph Bell's 1985 Holy Anorexia and Caroline Walker Bynum's 1988 classic, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, are equally relevant here.

*Although there is a great deal of uncertainty about the origins of the word beguine, this lay religious movement was important through the sixteenth century, especially, though not exclusively, in northern Europe. Beguines were not members of an established religious order (like the Benedictines or Franciscans, for example), but, following the model of a woman like Marie of Oignies, they lived individual or communal lives in imitation of Christ's, lives of poverty, chastity, self-denial, and service to the poor and the ill. (It is sometimes said the Marie of Oignies is the first beguine. In her 1986 women's history classic, A Small Sound of the Trumpet: Women in Medieval Life, Margaret Wade Labarge calls Marie of Oignies "the mother of the beguine movement." )

Update, 1 May 2026: Since posting this essay, I have discovered Alicia Spencer-Hall's excellent (and extended) examination of Marie of Oignies, made available through the Open Library of the Humanities Journal. To read her “Marie of Oignies, of Nivelles, or of Villers: The Multiple Textual Identities of a 13th-Century Holy Woman,” click here.