SOURCE: Garay, Kathleen. “‘She Swims and Floats in Joy’: Marguerite Porete, an ‘Heretical’ Mystic of the Later Middle Ages.” Canadian Woman Studies/Les Cahiers de la femme 17, no. 1 (winter 1997): 18-21.

In the following essay, Garay praises Porete's The Mirror of Simple Souls as an unconventional work that effectively adapts the language of courtly romance to a theological critique of patriarchal authority.

This Soul, says Love,

swims in a sea of joy, that is, in the sea of delights, flowing and running out of the Divinity. And so she feels no joy, for she is joy itself. She swims and floats in joy, without feeling any joy, for she dwells in Joy and Joy dwells in her.

(Porete Chapter 28, page 109)

The book from which these words are taken, written in the closing years of the thirteenth century by Marguerite Porete, is The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls and Those...