Marguerite Porete
She was burnt at the stake for heresy in Paris in 1310 after a lengthy trial for refusing to remove her book from circulation or to recant her views.
[14] She was then handed to the Inquisitor of France, the Dominican William of Paris, also known as William of Humbert, on the grounds of heresy in spite of her assertion in the book that she had consulted three church authorities about her writings, including the highly-respected Master of Theology Godfrey of Fontaines and had gained their approval.
In 1310, a commission of twenty-one theologians investigated a series of fifteen propositions drawn from the book (only three of which are securely identifiable today) and judged them to be heretical.
Despite the negative view taken towards Marguerite by Nangis, the chronicle reports that the crowd was moved to tears by the calmness with which she faced her death.
[17] After her death, extracts from the book were cited in the decree Ad Nostrum, which was issued by the Council of Vienne in 1311 to condemn the Brethren of the Free Spirit as heretical.
[18][19] Much of the book resembles a rational Boethian style argument between several parties and is written similarly to the medieval French poem The Romance of the Rose.
[20] Porete says that the Soul must give up Reason, whose logical conventional grasp of reality cannot fully comprehend God and the presence of Divine Love.
In fact, one of the main targets of her book is to teach to readers or listeners how to get to the simple state through device like images.
[23] (Chapter 21: Love answers the argument of Reason for the sake of this book which says that such Souls take leaves of the Virtues)Porete's vision of the Soul in ecstatic union with God, moving in a state of perpetual joy and peace, is a repetition of the Catholic doctrine of the Beatific Vision albeit experienced in this life, not in the next.
Where Porete ran into trouble with some authorities was in her description of the Soul in this state being above the worldly dialectic of conventional morality and the teachings and control of the earthly church.
The connection between Porete and the movement is somewhat tenuous, though, as further scholarship has determined that it was less closely related than some church authorities believed.
[citation needed] In 2006, the poet Anne Carson wrote a poetic libretto entitled Decreation, the second part of which takes as its subject Porete and her work, The Mirror of Simple Souls as part of an exploration of how women (Sappho, Simone Weil and Porete) "tell God",[28]
