SOURCE: Bryant, Gwendolyn. “The French Heretic Beguine: Marguerite Porete.” In Medieval Women Writers, edited by Katharina M. Wilson, pp. 204-26. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984.

In the following essay, Bryant summarizes Porete's life and examines the official denunciation of The Mirror of Simple Souls as a heretical work in the early fourteenth century.

Sometime between 1296 and 1306, in Valenciennes, Guy II, bishop of Cambrai, condemned the Mirror of Simple Souls as heretical and ordered it publicly burned in the presence of its author, Marguerite Porete. On June 1, 1310, Marguerite herself was burned in what Henry Charles Lea calls “the first formal auto-da-fé of which we have cognizance at Paris.”¹ These two burnings mark the chronological limits of what we know of Marguerite's life, for aside from the inquisitorial account of her trial and allusions to it in fourteenth-century chronicles, no documents survive. Nevertheless, scholars agree that she came from Hainaut...