MARGHERITA PORETE. - Heretical beguine, born in Hainaut (diocese of Cambrai), burned at the stake in Paris on 1 June 1310. Author of a mystical dialogue, *Le miroir des simples âmes anéanties et qui seulement demeurent en vouloir et désir d’amour*, a fundamental text of the Free Spirit movement, condemned at the Council of Vienne (1311). Between 1296 and 1306 she was first admonished in Valenciennes by the bishop of Cambrai, Guido, and her book was publicly burned as heretical. Persisting in spreading her book and doctrines, in the autumn of 1308 she was imprisoned and tried by the Inquisition of Paris as a relapsed heretic. Found guilty, she was handed over to the secular arm, which condemned her to be burned. The trial documents are in P. Fredericq, *Corpus documentorum Inquisitionis haereticae pravitatis Neerlandicae*, I, Ghent 1899, pp. 155-60, and II, pp. 63-65.
She may perhaps be identified with the Maria of Valenciennes mentioned by Gerson (*Tractatus de distinctione verarum visionum a falsis*, I, Antwerp 1706, p. 55). In her own book she refers to herself as a beggar or a beggarly creature. Contemporary chroniclers describe her as a *pseudomulier*, a clerical beguine (*bèguine clergesse*), and a woman highly learned in theology (*en clergie mult suffisant*). That she was a beguine is also confirmed by the trial records.
According to a later chronicler, she allegedly translated the Bible into the vernacular (*Fredericq, op. cit.*, II, 65), but Berger (*La Bible française au moyen âge*, Paris 1884) and Smalley (*The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages*, Oxford 1941) make no mention of her. *Le miroir des simples âmes* survives in the original French (a single manuscript); in a fourteenth-century English translation published by C. Kirchberger in the series *The Orchard Books*, London 1927 (three fifteenth-century manuscripts; the Carthusian Richard Methley [1451-1528] later made a Latin version of this translation); in a Latin translation from the original French (three manuscripts and a fragment: two from the fourteenth century, one from the fifteenth, and one from 1521); and in an Italian translation (four manuscripts; two from the fourteenth century, two from the fifteenth). In three of these Italian manuscripts the work is attributed to the Blessed Margaret of Hungary, a device also used in one of the English manuscripts to obscure the heretical character of the text (cf. Fl. Banfi, in *Memorie domenicane*, 57 [1940], fasc. 1 and 3). That *Le Miroir* is indeed the work of Marguerite Porete is first established by comparing passages from the book with those in the condemnation issued by the Paris Inquisition and the Council of Vienne (cf. R. Guarnieri, *Lo «Specchio delle anime semplici» di M. P.*, in *L’Osservatore Romano*, 16 June 1946).
Her doctrine, of uncommon subtlety, is not easily summarized; yet it unfolds less along the dialectical path of Neoplatonic deification than along the line of *caritas* as the means of an annihilation in God, which, with its consequent impeccability, renders not only moral law but every dogma and religious practice superfluous (Redemption, Grace, Church, hierarchy, sacraments, liturgy, prayer, virtue, asceticism), ultimately amounting less to a defined heresy (*Spiritus libertatis*) than to a mystical experience that has little left of Christianity. Apart from its early notoriety that alarmed the Inquisition of the time, the various translations and later copies—such as the one from Subiaco (1521)—the work continued to be regarded in Italy as a dangerous book by St. Bernardino of Siena (cf. L. Oliger, *De secta Spiritus Libertatis in Umbria saec. XIV*, Rome 1943, p. 85) and by the *Ordinationes* of the General Chapter of the Congregation of St. Justina in 1433 (cf. T. Leccisotti, *Congregationis S. Giustinae Ordinationes*, I, Montecassino 1939, I, 36). A compendium of thirty propositions, with their refutations, drawn from the *Speculum*, appears in Vat. lat. 4953, probably datable to 1438 and containing writings prepared for the Council of Florence.