PORETE, MARGHERITA. - Heretical Beguine, born in Hainaut (diocese of Cambrai), died at the stake in Paris on 1 June 1310. She was the author of a mystical dialogue: The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls and of Those Who Remain Only in the Will and Desire of Love, a fundamental text of Beghardism, condemned at the Council of Vienne (1311). Between 1296 and 1306 she was first warned at Valenciennes by the bishop of Cambrai, Guido, and her book was publicly burned as heretical. Persisting in disseminating the book and its doctrines, she was imprisoned in the autumn of 1308 and tried by the Inquisition of Paris as a relapsa and,
She could perhaps be identified with Maria di Valenciennes, whom Gerson mentions (Tractatus de distinctione verarum visionum a falsis, I, Antwerp 1706, p. 55). In her book, she speaks of herself as a beggar or mendicant creature. The chroniclers of the time call her pseudomulier, béguine clergesse and en clergrie mult suffisant. That she was a beguine is also established by the trial.
According to a late chronicler, she is said to 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) make no mention of her; Le mirouer des simples âmes has come down to us in the original French (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 middle of the fifteenth century; the Carthusian Richard Methley [1451–1528] made a Latin translation from this version); in the Latin translation from the French original (three manuscripts and a fragment: two from the fourteenth century, one from the fifteenth, and one from 1521); and in the Italian translation (four manuscripts: two from the fourteenth century and two from the fifteenth). In three of these Italian manuscripts the work is attributed to b. Margherita d'Ungheria, named—as Ruusbroec is in one of the English manuscripts—in order better to conceal the heretical character of the work (cf. Fl. Banfi, in Memorie domenicane, 57 [1940], nos. 1 and 3). That the Mirouer was the work of P. was first established by comparing passages from the book with passages from the condemnation by the Parisian Inquisition and from the Council of Vienne (cf. R. Guarnieri, Lo « Specchio delle anime semplici » e M. P., in L'osservatore romana, 16 June 1946).
The doctrine, of uncommon subtlety, is not easily identified; but it appears to be developed not so much through the dialectical structure of Neoplatonic deification as along the line of caritas, as the means of an annihilation in God which, with the consequent impeccability, makes not only the moral law but every dogma and every religious practice—Redemption, Grace, the Church, the hierarchy, the Sacraments, the liturgy, prayer, virtue, and asceticism—superfluous, ultimately arriving not so much at a defined heresy (Spiritus libertatis) as at a mystical experience that has very little Christian character left. Apart from its initial success, which impressed the Inquisition of the time, its various translations and late transcriptions, such as that of Subiaco (1521), the book is still remembered in Italy as a dangerous book by s. Bernardino da 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). A summary of 30 propositions, with their corresponding refutations, extracted from the Speculum, appears in Vat. lat. 4953, probably datable to 1438, which gathers writings for the Council of Florence.