SOURCE: Newman, Barbara. “The Mirror and the Rose: Marguerite Porete's Encounter with Dieu d'amours.” In The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature, edited by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Bradley Warren, pp. 105-23. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

In the following essay, Newman evaluates the extent to which Porete's The Mirror of Simple Souls may have been stylistically and thematically influenced by the thirteenth-century Roman de la rose.

Several years ago I proposed the new term mystique courtoise to categorize an array of vernacular mystical texts from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, especially but not solely those written by beguines.¹ The concept of mystique courtoise is meant to distinguish traditional forms of spiritual writing that drew on the lush imagery of the Song of Songs to characterize divine love, as Christian mystics had done ever since Origen, from a newer literary/religious mode that self-consciously inflected this tradition...