Allegories of Love in Marguerite Porete's 'Mirror of Simple Souls'

Abstract

Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls, dating probably from the 1290s, is, boasts the back cover, ‘the oldest known mystical work written in French, and the only surviving medieval text by a woman writer executed as a heretic’. All aspects suggested by this phrase — mysticism, language, manuscript tradition, women's literary culture, heresy — are amply discussed by Suzanne Kocher in this commendable volume. The material history of the Mirror of Simple Souls is complex, and relatively well rehearsed already, but fully justifies a first chapter substantially longer than the following discussions, which are all in their way reliant on this solid historical treatise. Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS F xiv 26 is one of the latest medieval witnesses, in any language, of this much translated work. Although the manuscript poses multiple difficulties for scholars hoping to read Marguerite Porete's original, it contains the sole extant version in French. The appeal of the Mirror of Simple Souls is obvious: it has been copied and translated, and there is evidence that copies have been ‘burned […], confiscated, altered, defaced, and destroyed’ (p. 48). Enough here to attract the attention of modern scholars from any number of academic disciplines; notwithstanding, Kocher appears to offer the first monograph from a medieval French literary perspective. Following a useful introduction are six chapters and a conclusion, bibliography, and index. The historical first chapter is a mine of detail — much, but not all, already in the scholarly domain. This confirmation of the author's meticulous research over a significant length of time amounts to a reconstruction of events and practices that inevitably at times rests on hypothesis. One of the more striking conclusions of this section is that ‘men and women did not write in markedly different ways’ (p. 78), this being a rational product of the literary and theological context. In fact, the very nature of ‘women's writing’ in the medieval period is questioned throughout. Such a simple yet strong statement may necessitate a repositioning of both medieval text and modern criticism, posits the volume's powerful conclusion. Kocher's main argument is that, within the allegory of human love, Marguerite Porete uses gender and other motifs as allegories in themselves; gender, status, and trade serve as versatile allegories for spiritual love, allowing boundaries to be crossed and language to be used with vitality and fluidity. Marguerite Porete was writing for an allegorically literate public, one that was both able and willing to negotiate works of multifaceted allegorical meaning. By the 1290s — and even more so by the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, when the Chantilly manuscript was copied — allegorical writing was well established. The text is challenging for modern scholars in its internal complexity and the initial hunt for meaning, for its material and linguistic alterity, and for its separate traditions following several early translations. This study valorizes the work of a scholar ready to meet the challenge.