Marguerite Porete was a Beguine from Hainault in northern France, writing in Old French at the end of the thirteenth century. Her single surviving book, The Mirror of Simple Souls Annihilated and Who Only Remain in Will and Desire of Love, is a sustained allegorical dialogue between Soul, Reason, Love, and several other personifications, mapping the soul’s progressive freedom from every constraint until it reaches what she calls the seventh state of annihilation.
The book was condemned and publicly burned in 1306 by the Bishop of Cambrai. Marguerite continued to circulate it. She was arrested in 1308, held in Paris by the Inquisition for eighteen months, and refused to recant or to take the oath that would have ended the proceedings. On 1 June 1310 she was burned at the stake in the Place de Grève. Witnesses described her bearing as so serene that bystanders wept.
Her book did not die with her. Stripped of her name, it circulated anonymously through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and was read by Eckhart and the wider Rhineland circle. Eckhart’s most radical formulations on the Seelengrund and the soul’s freedom from creaturely will echo Marguerite’s vocabulary directly. She was identified as the author only in the 1940s by the scholar Romana Guarnieri, working from inquisitorial records.
Her teaching is the most apophatic in any Christian language. The soul that has gone all the way takes leave of the virtues, of reason, of even its own will. It is annihilated not in the sense of destruction but in the sense that nothing of separate self remains to be a possessor of anything. There is no public-domain English translation. The standard modern version is Edmund Colledge’s Margaret Porette: The Mirror of Simple Souls (Notre Dame, 1999); the Paulist Press Classics of Western Spirituality volume translated by Ellen Babinsky (1993) is the other major edition.
