Reason Strikes Back

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the recently rediscovered Padua, Biblioteca universitaria di Padova, MS 1647 and gives the first in-depth analysis of its contents. This manuscript, like MS Vat. lat. 4953, contains a number of refuted errors taken from a Latin translation of Marguerite Porete's The Mirror of Simple Souls but takes a decidedly canon-legal approach to its refutations and employs vitriolic rhetoric that paints the Mirror as diabolical. It is the only known polemic written against the Mirror and it represents the strongest attack against it outside of its condemnations in Valenciennes and Paris and, in its rhetoric and detail at least, surpasses even those iconic events in the Mirror's history. The uniqueness of the text becomes even more important when considered in the context of its origins. While it exists only in a fifteenth-century copy, it was very likely first composed in the early fourteenth century, quite close in time to—perhaps even contemporarily with or before—the Mirror's two condemnations and Marguerite Porete's execution.