SOURCE: Dronke, Peter. “Lyrical Poetry in the Work of Marguerite Porete.” In Literary and Historical Perspectives of the Middle Ages: Proceedings of the 1981 SEMA Meeting, edited by Patricia W. Cummings, Patrick W. Conner, and Charles W. Connell, pp. 1-19. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 1982.

In the following essay, Dronke examines the lyrical, mystical, and erotic expressions of divine love in Porete's The Mirror of Simple Souls and situates the work in its historical context.

Hildegard of Bingen, as distinctive in her medical and cosmological writing as in her mystic visions and poems and drama, died in 1179. The hundred and twenty years that followed her death saw an astounding proliferation of writings by religious women, Latin and vernacular, prose and verse. Some of the high imaginative achievements of this period—the lyrics of Hadewijch of Antwerp, or Mechthild of Magdeburg's Flowing Light of Godhead, with its haunting transitions from...