Porete, Marguerite

PORETE, MARGUERITE. - Heretical Beguine, b. in Hainaut (diocese of Cambrai), d. at the stake in Paris on June 1, 1310. Author of a mystical dialogue: Le mirouer des simples âmes ananties et qui seulement demeurent en vouloir et désir d'amour, a fundamental text of Beguinism, condemned at the Council of Vienne (1311). Between 1296 and 1306 she was warned for the first time at Valenciennes by the bishop of Cambrai, Guido, and her book was publicly burned as heretical. Persisting in spreading the book and its doctrines, in the autumn of 1308 she was imprisoned and tried by the Inquisition of Paris as a relapsa and, found guilty, handed over to the secular arm, which condemned her to the stake. The documents of the trial are in P. Fredericq, Corpus documentorum Inquisitionis haereticae pravitatis Neerlandicae, I, Ghent 1899, pp. 155-60, and II, pp. 63-65.

She could perhaps be identified with the Marie of Valenciennes of whom Gerson speaks (Tractatus de distinctione verarum visionum a falsis, I, Antwerp 1706, p. 55). Of herself, in her book, she speaks as a beggar woman or a beggarly creature. The chroniclers of the time call her pseudomulier, béguine clergesse and en clergrie mult suffisant. That she was a Beguine also emerges from the trial.

According to a late chronicler, she would have 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) ignore her; Le mirouer des simples âmes has come down to us in the French original (a single manuscript); in the fourteenth-century English translation published by Cl. Kirchberger in the series The Orchard Books, London 1927 (three manuscripts from the mid-1400s; on that translation the Carthusian Richard Methley [1451-1528] made a Latin one); in the Latin translation from the French original (three manuscripts and a fragment: two from the 14th century, one from the 15th and one from 1521); in the Italian translation (four manuscripts; two from the 14th century, two from the 15th). In three of these Italian manuscripts the work is attributed to Bl. Margaret of Hungary, called (like Ruusbroec, in one of the English manuscripts) to better conceal the heretical character of the work (cf. Fl. Banfi, in Memorie domenicane, 57 [1940], fasc. 1 and 3). That the Mirouer is the work of P. emerged for the first time from a comparison between passages of the book and passages of the condemnation by the Paris Inquisition, as well as of the Council of Vienne (cf. R. Guarnieri, Lo « Specchio delle anime semplici » e M. P., in L'osservatore romano, 16 June 1946).

The doctrine, of no common subtlety, is not easily pinpointed; but it appears developed, rather than in the dialectical web of Neoplatonic deification, along the line of caritas, as the medium of an annihilation in God which, with the consequent impeccability, renders useless not only the moral law but any dogma and any religious practice (Redemption, Grace, Church, hierarchy, Sacraments, liturgy, prayer, virtue, asceticism), resulting ultimately not so much in a defined heresy (Spiritus libertatis) as in a mystical experience that has very little left of the Christian. The book, apart from the initial success that impressed the Inquisition of the time, the various translations and the late transcriptions, such as that of Subiaco (1521), is still remembered 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 S. Giustina of 1433 (cf. T. Leccisotti, Congregationis S. Justinae Ordinationes, I, Montecassino 1939, I, 36). An abstract of 30 propositions, with the relative confutations, extracted from the Speculum, appears in Vat. lat. 4953, datable with probability to 1438 and which collects writings for the Council of Florence.

Romana Guarnieri