The Sins of Marguerite Porète Religious Women in Medieval Christianity

THE SINS OF MARGUERITE PORÈTE
RELIGIOUS WOMEN IN MEDIEVAL CHRISTIANITY
Esti Mayer
2009
1
Paris: June 1, 13101. A woman called Marguerite Porète is burned at the stake 2. She has
endured a lengthy trial for heresy, because of her refusal to retract and recant her beliefs as she
wrote them in “The Mirror of Simple Souls”3. The book, found to be objectionable to the
Church, was publically burned, and its author, the person Marguerite, was decreed unfit to live
among Christians in Christendom. Who was this woman? Who were the Béguine Sisters to
whose community she belonged? How and why did these female Christian mystic communities
arise? What did they believe? How and why did they fall? And ultimately, why did Marguerite
Porète have to endure such brutality and virulent violence4, and why did she have to die?
Standing at the top of the medieval social pyramid, even as its influence waxed and
waned over time, the Church had the decisive voice that spoke in the name of God. The Church
gave Christian society its characteristic shape, it defined time, it set the annual calendar, it
governed cultic worship patterns and content, it gave meaning to social obligations, and was in
turn respected by the community as the locus of power. The principal goal of the Church as a
social actor was to create a “perfectly disciplined society under the moral and spiritual guidance
of the Church”5, while establishing as incontrovertible its ecclesiastic hegemony over a society
of the faithful. The Church stood, thanks to its own political savvy and considerable temporal
and theological effort, at the apex of the social, economic, political and spiritual pyramid of
medieval Christendom. Even as the Church responded to popular pressures from the bottom of
the pyramid, as in the case of the Marian cult for example 6, it claimed the right to be the sole
1
Saskia Murk-Jansen, Brides in the Desert, p. 75
2
Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies, p. 120
3
Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies, p. 128; Saskia Murk-Jansen, Brides in the Desert, p. 76
4
Daniel Bornstein, Medieval Christianity, p. 217
5
6
John Shinners, Medieval Popular Religion, p. 125
2
arbiter, by self-definition and by popular acclaim contemporaneously, of the normative
standards each such challenge met. The Church was the central repository of standards of
normative behaviour and belief; it was the central guide for the moral, temporal, and spiritual
lives of Christians who resided within the realm of the Catholic Church’s reach. Moreover, the
Church claimed, and won, the power to govern the Christian social response to people of other
faiths who resided in the same geographical area, such as Jews, and Muslims 7. The source of
Church authority was rooted in a traditional popular deference to men who delivered God’s
word; it was enshrined in a legal system that was partly shaped by the Church itself and partly
deferred to its demands; it was often the result of charismatic leadership that infused the claim
of authority to lead with compelling personal and theological characteristics; but at the end of
the day, the Church was certainly the most influential social institution in medieval
Christendom. The medieval Church, as the primary social institution that affected and
influenced the Catholic ethos, defended itself and its perceived subjects against challengers. Its
leadership role, even as it was somewhat interactive and responsive to popular pressures, was
hierarchical and exclusive, as it commanded medieval life for the willing and the unwilling
denizens of Western Christendom.
The power to define normativity and to impose its requirements, and conversely, the
power to define as heresy any challenge to normativity 8, in an essentially obligatory system,
carried with it many temporal benefits. Such power accrues economic rewards from taxation,
political rewards of temporal fidelity and political-military alliances, and organizational rewards
7
Daniel Bornstein, Medieval Christianity, pp. 265-301; Miri Rubin, In and Out of the Ghetto, pp. 177-208; See also:
Robert Chazan, Church, State, and Jew in the Middle Ages, pp. 133-140; Chaucer, “The Prioress’ Tale”, from the
Canterbury Tales, pp. 186-193
8
3
in the form of a pervasive permeation of society with agents of the central authority. In a
political system where Church and State are often one, or at the very least have blurred
boundaries, the intermediary between individuals and the elites per force was related to the
Church in one way or another, to one degree or another. The Church therefore was the most
significant agent that could assure, ensure, and enforce harmony in society. It provided the
uniform system of beliefs and practices, naturally related to Catholic Christian theology, with
the aim of forging a uniform moral community to the extent possible given the presence of
alien minorities within that community and given occasional inter-Christian challenges as well.
It is in this social context that one must regard the Church response to heresy, as well as its
response to the “other”. In Marguerite we have the chance to observe a “head to head combat
between a non-credentialed, non-academic mystic, and the scholastic theologians at Paris” 9. No
one came to her defence.
In medieval Christendom, between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, a revivalist
wind blew over society and many individuals and groups began to seek religious alternatives
and autonomous identities10. A cultural and religious ferment rose from popular ranks and was
met by ecclesiastic institutional scrutiny aimed at verifying each innovation for its suitability and
compliance with Church dogma. There were groups of individuals in medieval urban society
who actively pursued their persistent desire to experiment and discover new ways of life that
suited people’s particular experiences in the new economic-social constellation of
circumstances. Innovative interpretations of what it may mean to be Christian arose from a
confluence and interplay of cotemporaneous factors. There was among some a lingering
9
Bernard McGinn, The Essential writings of Christian Mysticism, p. 66
10
4
suspicion of great religious institutions that promised much and delivered little to the ordinary
person; there was some residual suspicion of temporal rulers and wealthy powerful men who
began to occupy ever growing portions of the public space and purse; there was a
commonplace desire to attain greater freedom from the pressures of social hierarchy given the
growing diversity of individual effort 11; and finally, the economic realities of solidified
urbanization and the emerging mercantilism, created new expectations of independence and
liberty in proto-capitalist settings for the nascent middle class. The Church could not abide by
the independent definitions and identities which it had for a millennium claimed as its exclusive
domain12. “Heresy- (was defined as the totality of) beliefs contrary to orthodox teaching,
publicly proclaimed and stubbornly maintained- ceased to be a purely intellectual concern, as
the debate over what it meant to be truly Christian involved large numbers of people and broad
segments of society.”13 The Church considered it its ecclesiastic duty and civic responsibility to
evaluate each innovation, pronounce it either acceptable or heretical, and with sufficient
temporal power at its disposal and command, to effectively compel society to obey Church
rulings as to these innovations and experiments, even at the cost of much blood and significant
treasure14.
Medieval Christian society was a gendered society, wherein an individual’s station in life
was determined to a very large extent by his or her gender. Influenced by traditional cultural
and commonly held stereotypical images of inherent female inferiority, and fed by a cultural
tendency which we in the twenty first century might regard as misogyny, the Church regulated
11
R.W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, p. 300
12
R.W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, pp. 344-346
13
14
5
the bodies of the faithful in accordance with their gender 15. Social stratification pertained to
males in so far as they belonged to the clergy, the knighthood, or the masses of working men 16.
The place of women in medieval society was that which was made for them by men, as they
walked through life’s paths alongside these men as ‘non-persons’ in their own right.
Categorized by the bio-social definitions of female sexuality, as virgins, mothers, widows, or
harlots, lay women were defined by men in their every endeavour. There was a propensity to
“...classify women exclusively according to their marital status- unmarried virgin, wife, widow-
and... in relation to their capacity to procreate...(Whereas) men’s status...depended primarily on
their social position or profession” 17. An enduring anxiety over the mysteries and power of the
female body lay at the root of some pervasive medieval perceptions of women 18. There
prevailed in the Middle Ages a perception of women, particularly among clergymen, which
accorded females characteristics of inherent sinfulness. Women were regarded as temptresses,
lustful, envious, gossiping, prideful creatures, who by nature require male control to lessen
their bred-in-the-bone disobedient inclinations. 19 A pseudo-scientific conception of female
bodies related them to the world of matter and flesh [carnally conceptualized for the most
part], classified women as possessed of wet and cold humours and therefore considered more
15
16
17
Daniel Bornstein, Medieval Christianity, p. 214; NOTE: There is an additional “option” for socially acceptable
females in medieval society- the women religious. Women religious were set apart from the lay women’s
categories. The women religious were for the most part cloistered, and their sexuality circumscribed by the
theological mandate of celibacy. Their bio-social status was sublimated under the theological restrictions, also
socially defined from without. Biologically defined categories regarding the fecundity of women, their availability
for procreation and for sexual intercourse, are socially determined. The theological mandate of celibacy removed
women religious from the pool of lay women whose sexuality served social roles. The Beguines sought a way of
living in the world outside the cloistered walls of female religious orders, to a great degree in reaction to a Church
given to clericalization and corruption.
18
Daniel Bornstein, Medieval Christianity, pp. 215-217
19
6
fallible, malleable, and susceptible to lust; whereas male bodies were conceptualized as abodes
of greater intellect and rationality, socially classified as perfect superior vessels of hot and dry
humours and spiritual finesse20. Culturally defined, female sexuality and long standing concepts
of bodily pollution, created an infrastructure for social control and regulation of female bodies
that had far reaching cultural, legal, social, religious, political, and economic consequences 21.
Prior to the eleventh century, even from the very birth of the Christian
movement in antiquity, there had arisen many competing and varied
alternative interpretations and practices of the Christian teachings, some of
which survived while others withered and disappeared over time. The
eleventh century however marked the beginning of an exceptional flowering of alternative
mysticism, both male and female22, and a devotional revival with phenomenal cultural
presence, which lasted well into the fifteenth century, impacting every human endeavour from
the arts, to science, to geographical exploration, to the construction of the economy, and more.
It is in this context that one must study the rise of popular religiosity in the twelfth century. Lay
and ecclesiastic persons sought alternatives to the strict rules of monasticism. In particular,
women, who had fewer religious and socially normative strategies open to them, asserted a
right hitherto denied them to break the boundaries of the quotidian and seek direct contact
20
Fiona Bowie, Béguine Spirituality, p. 9
21
22
NOTE: Whereas mysticism was hitherto the domain of both males and females in medieval religiosity, in the
eleventh century flowering of mysticism there was a clear preponderance of female mysticism. Erotic language had
been employed for a millennium by the time the Beguines entered the stage, but female mysticism fostered by
Beguine mystics, claimed as its own an erotic relationship with the Divine in growing numbers and with ever-
greater publicity. The carnal dimension of female mysticism may have made Church fathers and other celibate
clergy quite uneasy for its graphic and dramatic performance of female sexuality; whereas men like Bernard
Clairvaux could and did invert gender roles in his mystical writing, women mystics who inverted gender roles, or
who treated Christ as a carnal object and subject of their own sexuality, were considered more disruptive socially.
See: Bernard McGinn, The Essential writings of Christian Mysticism, pp. 27-34, 222-224, 256-261
7
with God on their own terms. Unable to join religious orders in inordinately large numbers,
some women formed unofficial close associations in the midst of society. The Béguine
movement was one of the first popular European women’s movements 23 and was a new social-
religious phenomenon in Christendom, the result of a combination of demographic factors and
new religious enthusiasm in the revivalist centuries: “There was a surplus of marriageable
women and widows...due to local feuds, wars, crusades, and the large number of celibate
secular and regular clergy”24. It was a unique medieval Christian spiritual women’s movement
that, unlike ecclesiastically suborned women’s orders, had no definite Rule, claimed no saintly
founder, sought no authorization from the Papacy, had no constitution, and promised no
particular benefits to its patrons. The Beguines were not bound by irreversible vows and its
adherents could continue to live ‘in the world’, to work and maintain relationships outside the
movement. It was a popular movement with widespread affiliations and with a significant
cultural impact on contemporary culture and spirituality in Western Christendom in the Middle
Ages25.
The Beguine challenge to Church orthodoxy can be framed by gender issues in a
gendered society wherein normative female social roles were for the most part rigid and strictly
enforced; as well as by the institutional power contests between the communities of
independent women and the Church. But these two characteristics of the Beguine challenge
cannot fully explain the “gory drama” 26 that was evident in the violent, brutal repression and
persecution of women like Marguerite Porète. There was something which Béguine women
23
Fiona Bowie, Beguine Spirituality, p. 13
24
25
26
8
represented that was far greater than male anxiety over female bodies and the challenge to
male dominance in society; there was something far more threatening than the institutional
challenge the disparate and poorly organized Béguine communities represented to the to the
behemoth Church institutions; there was something else at the root of the vehement response
to the Béguines exemplified in the extreme by Marguerite’s ghastly death. And that something,
I maintain, was the public aspect of spirituality in the Middle Ages. In other words, the Béguine
challenge can be theoretically conjured as a tripartite structure, comprised of gender,
organizational structure, and theological defiance. Neither gender nor institutional contests
alone could possibly trigger the violent opposition that resulted in Marguerite Porète’s
gruesome fiery death. The necessary and sufficient trigger to the violent repression of the
Béguines was, I maintain, the Eucharistic dispute that played itself out in public, in an
unprecedented and audacious appropriation, even usurpation, by women, such as Marguerite,
of the didactic authority of male clergy to teach and preach the word of God and interpret its
meaning to the people.
Marguerite lived in Hennegau 27, some say in Hainaut28. She joined the Beguines
sometime in her youth as a single woman. It is important, albeit not easy, to
contextualize the social background of Marguerite Porète, and we must therefore
resort to some acrobatic conjecture in order to surmise and extrapolate the
relevant information from the relatively scarce available data. Marguerite was an obviously
schooled and lettered woman. Her book is poetic and refined, its language elegant, subtle and
eloquent, its contents both fluid and deep. Marguerite’s spiritual message is garbed in beautiful
27
28
9
and engaging prose and verse in its appeal to the senses and the faithful heart. It is evident that
Marguerite Porète was unlike most of her contemporaries in medieval Christendom in her level
of literacy and in her capacity to live as a free woman who eventually dared look her inquisitors
in the eye and challenge their mastery over her body, mind and soul. Only wealthy women in
the Middle Ages had the resources to acquire an education or to afford a life free of male
patronage29, only aristocratic women would be able to command, as was their wont, men
whom they regarded as lower class then them. Indeed, many Béguine women belonged to the
well to do segments of urban society 30. Literacy was the privilege of a small minority in society
in general, and of an even smaller proportion of women. Marguerite must have hailed from a
prominent family that could afford to educate her, and indeed foresaw dividends of social or
economic benefit in Marguerite’s future given her training. Literate women in the Middle Ages
were offered thin didactic literary gruel of Christian piety and good housekeeping 31, and as a
rule were not admitted to institutions of higher learning or training 32, be they ecclesiastic
seminaries or lay institutions such as the universities that began to appear, like mushroom after
the rain, in the soil of Western civilization. Respectable women had to learn at home, the
normative space for female piety33 from tutors who were as rare as they were limited in scope.
Marguerite, therefore, can be assumed to have come from such an aristocratic background, if
indeed she joined the Béguines as a fully formed [in the French sense of the word] literary
woman.
29
30
31
John Shinners, Medieval Popular Religion, p. 283
32
Fiona Bowie, Béguine Spirituality, pp. 7-9
33
Giovanni Boccaccio,[Author], W.K. Kelly, [Translator], The Decameron, Vol. 1, pp. 5-11
10
However, it is entirely plausible and possible to extrapolate from the historical evidence
on hand, that Marguerite was one of the poor and indigent Béguines who began to inhabit the
Béguinages of the Low Countries in the second half of the 13 th century34. Marguerite could have
joined the Béguines as a young illiterate woman, as most females of the age were, and as a
Béguine she would have received her education within the community, not as an aristocratic
woman, but as a poor, commoner ‘everywoman’. The Béguines placed a high premium on
literacy and education of the poor, and many of the Béguine communities trained their
members to be teachers and actively sought to inform, teach, and educate the masses 35. The
various stages of a Béguine’s spirituality included a careful sensitization to the written word and
spiritual instruction both practical and literary. We cannot know with any degree of certainty if
Marguerite came to the Béguines a literate or illiterate woman. We do know, however, that as
a Béguine, as a mature woman, she was eminently literate, educated and had a flare for
sensitive and complex imagery and style. This would on the one hand tend to support the idea
that she came from rather noble upbringing; but on the other hand, the fact that no man came
to her rescue during her trial for heresy, would suggest a social isolation and a measure of
alienation which would support the idea that Marguerite came from humble stock. We will
never know36.
Beguine communities were a manifestation of a popular challenge to society’s
definition of women’s roles. Béguines were a special breed of women in the
Middle Ages. Unbound by vows of chastity, the Béguines could remain part of the
34
35
36
11
social-cultural matrix, retain their property, even live at home with their families, and they
came together for religious services and for communally organized work as cloth makers. City
people resented the new freedoms claimed by the women who left parishes, flouted family
expectations, and flaunted their economic independence in an era of staunch patriarchal social
models37. It was difficult to compartmentalize Béguine women who did not fit into any
acceptable social definition: “...these women promise no obedience to anyone, and do not
renounce their property or profess an approved Rule” 38 [although later, under pressure and
following the violent repression of recalcitrant religious men and women, the Béguines
organized themselves in more institutional Béguinages and adopted the Rule of the Third Order
of Saint Francis].
Ecclesiastic authorities were perplexed and vexed by the Beguines because of the
women’s spiritual fecundity and creativity, but so was society at large, particularly the newly
minted mercantile classes and guilds who begrudged the unexpected competition 39. Met with
Hostility from the guilds, who resented the women’s independence and their professed ability
to avoid apprenticeship, the Béguines gradually coalesced in separate more rigidly institutional
communities on the outskirts of towns where they could gain protection from the population,
live their spiritual lives unmolested, and proceed to earn their livelihood at liberty 40. The
37
38
39
NOTE: It is important to note that the guilds were an important element in the medieval economy. The guilds
organized production and distribution of material goods, normalized commerce, and were the main engines of the
moneyed economy. As such they were important to the Church first as agents of social order, but also as a source
of considerable income to the Church through taxation, donations, bequests, and the financiers of special projects
initiated by the Church, from cathedral building to crusader campaigns. The opinion of the guilds, therefore, was
relevant, cogent, and influential when the matter of the Beguines had come to the attention of the Church. The
economic aspect of persecutory Church policies is an important topic that merits further in depth analysis and
investigation.
40
12
communities survived thanks to the income earned in such trades, as well as from endowments
and gifts made by the members or their supporters in the general population 41. Some of the
Béguines adopted begging as a means of obtaining their livelihood 42 echoing the vagrant
begging mendicant friars, a factor that further exacerbated economic tensions and contributed
to the matrix of suspicion that enveloped the Béguines and eventually led to the charges of
heresy levelled against them.
The fundamental orientation of the Béguines was toward the poor and the infirm, as
well as toward education, and a minority of Béguines found employment as housekeepers and
laundresses for the wealthy, in order to supplement the community income. Living at
Béguinages, the women achieved a life of simplicity and balance, were independent and
integrated in mainstream society: “They avoided institutionalization while reaping the benefits
of community living and combined manual labour and prayer, contemplation and caring, in a
way which strikes us with its practicality and goodness” 43. Thus, neither nuns nor wives or
mothers, the Béguines occupied a place of gendered ambivalence, they avoided traditional
characterization and focused on exploring their own potential to create and control their own
institutions, and to forge spiritual relationships with God with unequal originality. The term
“Beggina” was hurled as a pejorative, an insult, implying a danger to the purity of decent virgin
women in Europe: “What do you want from those (Begginas)? If you wish, I will show you a
good woman, who can obtain from God all she wants!” 44 The Béguines aroused ridicule among
the populace who could not fathom female spirituality that was un-tethered to the Church,
41
Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies, pp. 104-109
42
43
44
13
unregulated by men, and unsupervised by the Church. They were often associated with the
Magdalene in the popular imagination, the so called prostitute of the New Testament, the
symbolic ewer of lascivious sexual mores, with suggestions that their sexuality was complicated
by promiscuity and homosexuality as well 45. These women were therefore regarded as loose
and dangerous, their freedom to leave their Béguinages and receive visitors in their homes
aroused suspicions and cast aspersions on their purity. The Béguines were strange: “...their
informality, irregularity, lack of solemn vows, mystical experiences” 46 made them odd ducks in
medieval Christian society. But the popular sentiments paled before the ecclesiastic campaign
to discredit the Béguines. These unruly women who preached confidence in the soul’s
unmediated union with God could not be controlled, could not fit into the hierarchy of the
Church, could not fit into the social matrix, and therefore had to be suppressed by the one
institution in society that made it its business to define normative behaviour and maintain a
balance of peace and spiritual revival under its tutelage- the Church 47. The Church denounced
any form of monastic religious life that was not of its authorship and could potentially compete
with the Church and which challenged the cloistering of women religious as a matter of
theological imperative.
The Béguines developed in their worship and cultic practices a distinctive and
intimate relationship with the Eucharist which they regarded as an object of
spiritual and even carnal love. In fact, the carnality of the Eucharist embodied in the
claim of transubstantiation was being defined, defended and contested at the same
45
46
47
14
time Beguine mystics began to practice their devotions of the Eucharist in increasingly carnal
terms. The carnal aspect of the Eucharist echoed in the carnal devotion devised by female
mystics, thereby affirming the new Eucharist doctrine of that the body of Christ materialized
miraculously through the Host. The Beguines tended to preserve consecrated Hosts not in the
vestry but in the church itself, in specially designed receptacles hung over the altar 48. Thus
visible, the Eucharist had an ongoing presence in the very air of the holy space, and several
Béguine mystics began to experience and nurture rapturous interactive meditations with the
Host, to the point of experiencing physical orgasmic climaxes and entering what must have
seemed to be a state of miraculous ecstatic trance: ”Afterwards, she would always be in a state
of ecstasy...she did not remain in herself and was completely transported in her love...she would
offer herself so ardently to God that it seemed she would faint with the great fervour of spirit
that consumed her...(that) it seemed that she would not be able to come back” 49. The mystical
union with the Body of Christ was woven into Béguine spirituality and worship, and increasingly
gained a patina of overt sexuality which was at once beguiling for its public display of female
sexuality and carnality, and thus was perceived as threatening to the male fathers of the
Church. The holy raptures were seen by many a friar to be evidence of some Divine immanence,
but the drama surrounding the mystical experience could so overwhelm the spectators that it
put the audience, as far as Catholic orthodoxy was concerned, at risk of heresy, of mistakenly
believing that an individual could actually conjure Divine Grace in an unmediated fashion 50, or
even believing in the magic a Béguine could perform, indicating she possessed a power greater
48
49
K. Garay & M. Jeay, The Life of Saint Duceline, p. 54
50
K. Garay & M. Jeay, The Life of Saint Duceline, p. 57 “The consolation that they experienced was so great that it
seemed as if they were with God”.
15
than a male priest’s power: “Her whole body was suspended in the air... And she remained this
way from the time she had received communion until evening” 51. The Béguine Saint Duceline,
for instance, secured a reputation as a levitating mystic, whose theatrical and spectacular fetes
attracted devotees and worshippers from far and wide. In Chapter, she would advise her sisters
that she had received instructions from God, directly, with immediate implications for the
sisters and their institution52. Marguerite Porète, a theologian, preferred to say the unsaybale
not through ecstatic performance but through her book in which she described the personal
experience she had had thus: “Ah, it is no wonder if such a Soul is overwhelmed, for Gracious
Love makes her wholly drunken, and so drunken that she does not let her pay heed to anything
but to herself, because of the intensity with which Love delights her” 53. She too made a
controversial statement about a union with God which can be experienced by an individual in
this life, once he or she freely chooses to progress toward the Divine through Love and
Knowledge and submission to the Divine will alone 54. She claimed, in essence, that spiritual
perfection was attainable through reason, and through a personal relationship with Christ 55,
and not necessarily through the ministrations of the Church.
Béguine women practiced devotions and bodily abnegation of a great variety and scope,
from wearing hair shirts to practicing spiritual anorexia, the reward for which was often
experienced in instances of altered consciousness in which the mystics felt close to God 56. The
fragility of the mystical experience, its theatrical and highly emotional tenor, and the persistent
51
52
53
Bernard McGinn, The Essential writings of Christian Mysticism, p. 175 [Citing The Mirror of Simple Souls,
Translated by Edmund Colledge, J.C. Marler, and Judith Grant, University of Notre Dame Press, Indiana, 1999]
54
Bernard McGinn, The Essential writings of Christian Mysticism, pp. 30-33
55
Bernard McGinn, The Essential writings of Christian Mysticism, p. xv
56
16
gendered associations with female sexuality, made ecclesiastic authorities and lay people
weary. “Certain people were trying to destroy the holy institution that the Saint and she had
founded...advising her to embrace another order” 57. The ‘not in my back yard’ attitude of both
the clergy and laity who were in awe of the spiritual gifts of the Béguines but concerned with
the theological and social revolutionary aspects of their ways and beliefs, was soon to leave its
mark on Béguine communities, especially those who subscribed to the heretical idea that
certain Béguine mystics, such as Saint Duceline, could eventually rival the Holy Mother much
like Saint Francis could be imagined as the Second Christ58.
Women mystics were concerned not with an abstract theory of God, but with a
personal relationship with God. They usually wrote about their personal experience
with the Divine, which they wished to communicate and share with their fellow
Christians, following a transformational vision or experience. They did not claim
authority other than their sense of being an instrument of God, with whom through their
Eucharist devotions they had a personal, intimate, even sexual relationship. Marguerite’s book
described a personal mystical experience of union between the soul and God, the love and
affection between them overshadowing what she called “the highest stage of...perfection...
(which is) beyond the rules of the Church”59. Béguine mysticism spoke about the soul’s farewell
to virtue with a whiff of anticlericalism. The Béguine mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg wrote:
Lord, you are my lover,

My longing,
My flowing stream,
57
58
59
17
My sun,
And I am your reflection.60
The unmistakable sexual overtones61 in Mechthild’s poetry represent a daring experiment with
mysticism, and with unmediated religiosity, that predates the Reformation and may indeed be
considered proto-Protestant62. Particularly interesting is the Béguine innovative penchant for
the vernacular in discussing matters hitherto referred to by men in Latin, as well as their
assertion that the knowledge of self is significant for the knowledge of God placing interiority in
the centre of religiosity63. The Inquisition, in criticism of overt female sexuality, and in
abhorrence of female independent spirituality that lay outside the doctrinal boundaries of the
Church, was poised to condemn the Béguines as heretics. The Béguine extra-institutional
circumstances, and their original feminine spirituality, threatened the Church fundamentally.
The Church could not abide by women who broke with normative female social roles, with
women who flouted celibacy as a requirement for spiritual purity, or with women who paid no
mind to female religious orders and their stringent rules of conduct and therefore were free
from the yoke of Papal supervision. The Church, could neither suborn nor tolerate a theology
that preached unmediated access to Divine Grace by anyone who, as the Béguines preached,
would attain salvation if he or she loved God, their neighbour, and themselves. That was too
easy a path for salvation that contravened all ecclesiastically ordained paths to salvation, and it
completely bypassed the Church, its teachings, its clergy, its institutional hold on society, and its
very authority to speak in the name of God.
60
61
62
63
Saskia Murk-Jansen, Brides in the Desert, pp. 80-81
18
Marguerite Porète was one of these women, and worse, she wrote a widely
circulated popular book in the vernacular “The Mirror for Simple Souls”, in which
she both asserted her independent voice as a woman, as a spiritual being, and as
an innovative religious thinker. She wrote things like: “We can begin with the
commandment to love...To love God, to love ourselves...and our fellow Christians...All these
aspects of the commandment are necessary for our salvation, and if we do not observe them,
then Grace will not live in us”64. The Church could not control her and she knew there will be
inevitable consequences which she was ready to bear: “It seems to her... that she should love
only works of goodness... there is no death which would be martyrdom to her except to abstain
from the works which she loves, which is to delight in pleasing him” 65. Her book was regarded as
a repudiation of the Church in so far as she, as did her sister Béguines all, believed herself to be
one with God and therefore in a state of Divine Grace that obviated moral laws, free of Church
mandated ethical constraints and discipline. Marguerite wrote: “The creature abandons self
and strains to act beyond the counsels of men... to achieve the perfection of the evangelical
counsels... of Jesus Christ. So she does not fear... people’s words... nor can any soul who has
been overwhelmed by him”66. And they in the Church therefore said that she and her sister
“...Béguines, (were) afflicted by a kind of madness, discuss the Holy Trinity and the Divine
essence, and express opinions on matters of faith and sacraments contrary to the Catholic faith,
deceiving many simple people...We have therefore decided and decreed...that their way of life is
64
65
Bernard McGinn, The Essential writings of Christian Mysticism, p. 174 [Citing The Mirror of Simple Souls,
66
Ibid.
19
to be permanently forbidden and altogether excluded from the Church of God” 67. She was, in a
word, a heretic68.
Marguerite Porète was a particularly vocal and visible Beguine woman. Some medieval
women mystics opted for a strategy of self preservation through a rhetoric of self-
diminishment, careful not to overtly challenge male dominated Christendom. They claimed
their visions were not self generated but were received from God, careful not to claim
authority. Marguerite was less careful when she wrote and said: “...this precious beloved of
mine is taught and guided by me...she is transformed into me, and such a perfect one, says
Love, takes my nourishment”69. Marguerite did not shy away from claiming responsibility and
owning her own interpretation of Christ’s Love. She did not hide behind the rhetoric of
diminishment and therefore did not pass under the radar, and sacrificed herself preservation in
a deliberate strategy of speaking her truth regardless of the consequences. Marguerite was also
unfortunate in being caught between a rock and a hard place. Her condition was made more
precarious by the need of King Philip the Fair to ingratiate himself to the Pope by
demonstrating his unwavering support of orthodoxy through the persecution of a heretic 70. It
was bad timing for Marguerite. She published a book in which she addressed the people
directly, without mediation, in their own language which unlike the normative Latin reserved by
67
68
NOTE: Heresy is defined by its opposite- orthodoxy. The Church was the sole arbiter of orthodoxy and therefore
was able to define as heresy any idea, action or movement that contravened the orthodoxy, while imposing ever
stricter penalties on transgression there from. The Holy Office of the Inquisition was born of the desire to frame
orthodoxy and uphold its power to dictate behaviour. The gradual fanaticism of some Inquisitors against heretics,
people who transgressed against Church doctrine, testifies to the difficulty inherent in disciplining complex
societies through the enforcement of orthodoxies.
69
Marguerite Porète, The Mirror of Simple Souls, in: Fiona Bowie, Beguine Spirituality, p. 26
70
Bernard McGinn, Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics, p. 68
20
the clergy for matters religious they understood full well, and she asked the people to
contemplate the word of God through her own lens but with their own perspicacity unaided by
clerics: “I beg you, those who read these words, try to understand them inwardly, in the
innermost depths of your understanding, with all the subtle power at your command, or else
you will risk of failing to understand them at all” 71. Her book would be publicly burned and
banned72; she could be excommunicated; she could be denied all protection; and she could be
expelled from the realm. But still, the persecution of Marguerite was particularly violent
because she, unlike most Béguines, was actually burned at the stake. What did she say that so
inflamed her inquisitors? The Church had experience with women of ambiguous social and
spiritual standing, such as with female saints and nuns; the Church had vast resources of
manpower and treasure with which to combat any political or institutional challenge, be it
temporal or theologically motivated. The Béguines did not represent such a massive threat to
the religious hierarchy or to the secular powers of the Church. What did Marguerite Porète say
or do to ignite the pyre of extreme, absolute and irrevocable intolerance?
The answer lies in what she said and how she said it, but also in did not say, and to
whom both her words and her silence were directed 73. The Church and its inquisitorial judges
71
Marguerite Porète, The Mirror of Simple Souls, in: Fiona Bowie, Beguine Spirituality, p. 47
72
73
NOTE: The question may also be asked whether Marguerite would have been dealt with in the same fashion had
she not been a Beguine. There is of course no way to answer that question with any measure of authority or
accuracy. She was a Beguine., and as such she was treated. However, being a Beguine afforded Marguerite a
particular freedom which may otherwise have been denied a “regular” women of her era. She was literate and
articulate. Did she receive her education as a Beguine.? We cannot know. She was able to travel and move freely
between population centres, cities, towns and villages, her mystic status akin to the status of a “regular” women
religious which may have conferred upon her some protection on the journey. She belonged to an organized
institution, which gradually consolidated its organizational structures under Church pressure, and when she spoke
she was perceived to speak not only in her name but in the name of all the women in her institution or movement.
She represented an organization, not just herself. Was that also a factor in her persecution? Was the Beguine.
21
formulated Marguerite’s culpability in what I conceptualize were four sins. Her first sin against
the Church was that Marguerite Porète maintained, to her death, that salvation could be
achieved independently through the experience of Divine Grace and unmediated intimate
spiritual love, not necessarily through Baptism, Confession, and the celebration of Mass with
wine and the Eucharist, but individually 74, freely, personally, by every Christian man or woman.
Meditating on the mysteries of Christ’s humanity and through prayerful devotions to the
Eucharist, men and even women could practice a commitment to good works and gain Divine
Grace and attain salvation75.
Marguerite Porète lived in a time of increasing “suspicion toward extra-canonical groups
like the Beguines. Tremendous ambivalence had been building up in ecclesiastical attitudes
toward these semi-religious who took no vows but lived the vita apostolic in the world, in the
wake of Lateran IV’s prohibition of new orders” 76. The Beguines had a general tendency to
regard institutional structures as secondary to a religious life, and they freely moved between
Béguinages and other looser arrays of female social communities 77. On the one hand this
contravened Church doctrine and the age old orthodoxy which held that salvation was only
possible through the ministry of the Church and its sacraments, as administered by male clergy
thus trained and certified by God’s papal ministers on earth. Only the Church could lead the
faithful to salvation78. On the other hand the very institution of the Church, along with its claim
to be the arbiter of normative behaviour and the sole responsible social organization that could
movement victimized through the vehicle of Marguerite’s persecution? We do not know for sure. These are,
however, valid questions that merit further investigation.
74
Walter Simons, Cities of Women, p. 25
75
76
77
78
22
assure social stability, was challenged and undermined by the proposed unbridled fluidity
between defined socio-religious categories which marguerite and her sisters practiced. Béguine
spiritual writing claimed an equal footing with normative male conceived ecclesiastic teachings.
Written out of an urge to communicate mystical experiences of great importance that were
testimony to a direct relationship with God, Béguine writings in effect claimed a theological
authority beyond that which the Church was willing to share. Marguerite claimed to be an
instrument of God, a creature of God, thus placing herself outside and beyond Church control,
unlike proper Christian women who were normatively described as members of the flock of the
faithful, to be shepherded by the institution of the Church79.
Her second sin, as perceived by the Church, was that Marguerite challenged the
gendered structure by asking: “And why would Holy Church not recognize these
royal ones, daughters of the king, sisters of the king and brides of the king?”80 Her
boldly gendered mysticism addressed to semi-religious women who, in some
analysts’ opinion presaged the feminist movement 81, made her more conspicuous to Church
leaders and put her in the crosshairs of their bows. Marguerite belonged to the Béguine orders
that threatened to subvert, even overturn and reverse the ecclesiastically designed socio-
religious gendered order, wherein males were in positions of leadership and women followed.
Friars, who ministered the Béguines, were historically known to have held Béguine mystics in
awe, in admiration of the women’s religious integrity, spontaneity and charisma, even though
the women were clearly, in the eyes of orthodoxy at least, autodidactic lesser spiritual beings
79
80
Bernard McGinn, Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics, p. 69 [Citing The Mirror of Simple Souls, Translated by
Edmund Colledge, J.C. Marler, and Judith Grant, University of Notre Dame Press, Indiana, 1999]
81
23
whose education was not anchored in Church doctrine and teachings 82. The Church
recommended that women either marry, or if they chose a religious life, that they be confined
to cloisters as the ideal models for women 83, and yet Marguerite and her sisters inverted the
Church doctrine that confined women in society to “a legally, culturally, and religiously
(subordinate) position”84. Some misogyny was an integral part of Christian piety. The Dominican
Giovanni Dominici, for example, produced an ABC list of female sinfulness, underscoring the
imperfection of the female gender as the opposite of the perfect male body and mind 85.
Marguerite, in “The Mirror of Simple Souls”, subverted stereotypical gender differences
between male learning and female intuition, as she and the Béguines demonstrated their
superiority over the learned male masters by suggesting that the female mystics had deeper
insight and could access greater truth by acting on a higher plane: “You talk, we act...You
search, we find”86. Marguerite threatened the dogma that women by their nature were
subordinate to men and could hold no spiritual or temporal authority over them 87. Moreover,
the Béguines were women who had assumed a religious life but neither vows of obedience nor
lived by an approved rule88. That, the Church worried, could sow confusion and disarray among
Christians and could potentially lead to error. Only the Church was a bulwark against such
anarchy. The Church, after all, stood at the apex of the tripartite social stratification model,
which freed spiritual leaders from temporal authorities, the spirit being superior to the flesh 89.
Spirit and flesh were, of course, gendered concepts, with spirit imagined as masculine and the
82
83
84
85
Daniel Bornstein, Medieval Christianity, pp. 217- 218
86
87
88
89
24
flesh decidedly feminine, which per force meant that schematically, women had to be
subordinate to men, particularly to men of the cloth.
Marguerite, therefore, offended against the prevailing social-spiritual model. She and
her followers were a threat to hierarchical stability 90 given their publically proclaimed new
expectations from the political process and the attendant erosion of ecclesiastic institutions
therein. It is instructive to note that the book, when published under Marguerite’s name, was
burned and banned; when after her death her name was redacted from subsequent editions
and replaced with anonymity, “The Mirror of Simple Souls” gained widespread popularity and
was read by men and women throughout Christendom as the mystical product of a presumed
male author whose teachings were considered both valuable and acceptable to Church
authorities and the laity alike. For example, Meister Eckhart, the German theologian-
philosopher, who worked with pious lay groups, known as the “spokesman for the religion of
articulate townspeople”91 was thought to have been acquainted with and influenced by
Marguerite’s spirituality and by her defiant socio-theological stance 92.
Her third sin was her anti-nominian tendency, or the idea that the Béguines and their
followers were under no obligation to obey the laws of morality or ethics, and that salvation
was granted by Divine Grace and predestination.
Let us take one Soul for all, says Love, which Soul neither desires nor despises
poverty nor tribulation, nor mass nor sermon, nor fast nor prayers, and gives to
Nature all that is necessary to it, without remorse of conscience; but
such nature is so well ordained by transformation of unity of Love, to which
this Soul is conjoined, that nature asks nothing which is forbidden. 93
90
91
92
Bernard McGinn, The Essential writings of Christian Mysticism, pp. 35-40, 412-420, 429, 490, 493
25
Marguerite inverted the Church doctrine that required lay people to seek salvation through the
offices of the clergy, because each category of Christians had a prescribed path to salvation in
accordance with their place in the Church and in society at large 94. The Béguines’ gendered
ambivalence led to their portrayal as the mirror images of virginity, associated with anti-
nomianism and therefore heretical 95. Anti-nomianism is the polar opposite of the Church
orthodoxy of legalism, the notion that obedience to a code of religious law earns salvation. This
was a direct challenge to the Church’s claim of absolute authority over the spiritual guidance of
Christians, most particularly offensive because of the popularity of the proto-Protestant ideas
of emancipation that took root among the people96.
Marguerite was one of the most vocal opponents of clerical authority, particularly when
it came to the authority of morally suspect priests and clergy to administer the holy Eucharist.
She wrote: “The Soul is drawn up by the height of Love into the delight of thought through
meditation and relinquishes all labours of the outside and of obedience to another through the
height of contemplation”97. She advocated a rejection of intermediaries and individualized
98
access to the Divine. The soul, she said, is free. Marguerite spoke up against the normative
status quo. The sacrament of the Eucharist, as well as the sacrament of Penance, were
exclusively administered by men whose frame of reference was intrinsically male, and whose
tendency was to identify women with their gender rather than with their actions, even when
93
Bernard McGinn, Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics, p. 79 [Citing The Mirror of Simple Souls, Ch. 9,
94
95
96
97
98
26
these actions had nothing to do with sex 99. The legal and social subordination of women was
compounded by the spiritual objectification of women which, to an educated woman like
Marguerite, may have been at the very least irksome. The so called Eucharist dispute centered
around the Béguine assessment of male priests’ piety, given widespread tendencies of Simony
and Nicolaitism100. How could these men, who often paid money to obtain their office and who
often gave themselves to “impure acts”, be trusted to administer the sacrament of the
Eucharist to good holy women? Women, so obviously spiritually inspired and so obviously
inspirational to Christian people, had been prohibited by these morally tainted men from
publically speaking on religious matters; women’s bodies were a permanent distraction to these
males because of male fallibilities and weaknesses of the flesh that caused the very physicality
of women to be proscribed 101; women, even saintly and exceptionally spiritual women, were
thought by these lesser men to lack training and perspicacity, because of their natural and
biologically limited constitution, to interpret Scripture, and were declared by men to be
theologically suited only to private religiosity confined to the household 102. What qualified these
morally suspect men more than the simple women who followed Christ’s teachings and
venerated the Host so wholeheartedly? To quote her again: “And why would Holy Church not
recognize these royal ones, daughters of the king, sisters of the king and brides of the king? ”103
Marguerite was asking tough and daring questions regarding gender roles within the Church,
and along with the social upheaval such ideas signalled, they also invalidated the status of
clergy in society and underscored the moral perversion and corruption that was said to infect
99
100
101
102
103
27
the Church in the Middle Ages. At the very peak of Church regulation of clerical celibacy, which
was based on a variety of concerns, that were designed to a very great extent to contour the
clerical relationship with the laity 104, Marguerite stepped up to the proverbial soap box and
proclaimed the king naked.
It was probably Marguerite’s fourth sin which spelled her ultimate demise and
undoing. She wrote in the vernacular Old French and her book was translated into
other languages as well as it spread among the faithful. The shift to the vernacular
was a shift away from central Church authority, it asserted a popular freedom
from the language of hierarchical authority, and a freedom to liberate the soul in defiance of
normative boundaries set by the Church105. The controversial content of her writings was made
all the more suspect because she addressed herself, in the vernacular, directly to the laity by
preaching, an exclusively male vocation by Church dogma, thus infringing upon the domain of
clerics without proper supervision or training. It is worth noting the words of Guibert of
Tournai, a Franciscan master of theology at Paris:
There as in our lands women called Béguines... They have interpreted the
mysteries of Scripture and translated them in the common vernacular, although
the best experts in Scripture can hardly comprehend them. They read
these texts in common, without due respect, boldly, in their little convents
and in their workshops, or even in public places. I have myself seen and read
and held in my hands a Bible in French, whose exemplar is available to
everyone at Parisian writing-shops so that heretical and erroneous, dubious,
or stupid interpretations might be copied.106
Marguerite Porète wrote in the vernacular, thereby bypassing the Church by reaching the
people directly. She thus denied the superiority of the clergy over the laity 107 and created an
104
Daniel Bornstein, Medieval Christianity, p. 188, 194
105
106
107
28
alternative to the Church in a time when no such option was legal. Marguerite challenged the
Church monopoly by going straight to the people, a clear contravention of the dogma that
forbade preaching by anyone but priests108 and in any language but Latin. After the 1274
Second Council of Lyons, Guibert of Tournai accused the Beguines of “cultivating novelties in
their vernacular exegeses of Scripture” 109. Not only did they use the local idiom but they read
the scriptures on street corners and public squares. It was vulgar. It was decidedly not holy, not
sacred, and it diminished and distorted the status of religiosity in the realm. Marguerite
through her book could, Guibert of Tournai was concerned, “lead more and more people
astray” by her “stained...common, vulgar utterance”110.
Marguerite Porète subverted the superiority of the clergy over laity 111 by denying the
mediating function of the Church and by transmitting knowledge to the people in their native
tongue. Ecclesiastic culture was founded on an infrastructure of Latin texts; the circulation of
vernacular teachings and interpretations of scripture could now reach the laity who would, so
the Church feared, engage with these texts and possibly re-evaluate their Christian beliefs and
practice their faith without regard to ecclesiastic norms and legislation. It was a prescription for
social, spiritual, theological revolution which the Church could not abide by. Marguerite
preached to men and women, she preached in the vernacular, she talked about unmediated
salvation through Divine Grace, she challenged the authority of corrupt and fallible men priests
to serve as sacramental vessels, she subverted gender roles in the social and ecclesiastic
matrices, and she bypassed all Church institutions and took her act on the road reaching the
108
109
110
111
29
faithful directly. Her mysticism was at odds with patriarchal norms, her gender made her
vulnerable, and her lay status only exacerbated her condition in that she aimed, through the
book, to deliberately move faith from the centre, the Church, to the periphery, the margins of
society where she resided. She in fact attempted to subvert the hierarchy so assiduously
protected by the Church, and the Church decreed that she had to be silenced. Her book was
“judged so heretical and erroneous and containing such heresy and error as to be eliminated” 112
and The Mirror indeed was burned. After the Gregorian reform refashioned Catholicism into a
centralized religion with the Church at the helm of this hierarchy, Papal authority over religious
expression became absolute. The multiplicity of religious expressions and experiments with
spiritual innovation, such as the women’s popular religious movement which Marguerite Porète
belonged to, and the vernacular texts freely produced and circulated by the Béguines among
Christians, threatened to splinter the centralized model of control, and the Church grew
increasingly intolerant of any form of such autonomy 113. In time, after considerable effort and
bloodshed, some religious individuals and groups were indeed incorporated into the Church,
while others were excluded. The multiplicity of Marguerite Porète’s sins brought this Béguine
mystic into direct confrontation with the full might of Papal ecclesiastic authorities. They tried
her and banned the fruits of her mind; they excoriated her spiritual claims and deemed both
her and her book heretical, and still she refused to betray her sense of piety and her particular
conviction regarding her intimate relationship with the Lord; they finally silenced her as they lit
the match to the kindling that was her final perch on earth, in Paris: June of 1310.
*******
112
113
30
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Boccaccio,Giovanni,[Author], Kelly, W.K.,[Translator], The Decameron, Or Ten Days
Entertainment of Boccaccio, Grand Rapids: Kessinger
Publishing, 2007
Bornstein, Daniel, E. [ed.], Medieval Christianity: A People’s History of Christianity,

Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009
Bowie, Fiona [ed.], Béguine Spirituality: Mystical Writings of Mechthild of

Magdeburg, Beatrice of Nazareth, and Hadewijch of Brabant, New
York: Crossroad Publishing, 1990
Chazan, Robert, Church, State, and Jew in the Middle Ages, New York: Behrman
Press, 1980
Cooper, Helen, Canterbury Tales, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996
Garay, Kathleen, & Jeay, Madeleine, The Life of Saint Duceline: a Béguine of Provence,
Cambridge: D.S. Brewster Publishing, 2001
McGinn, Bernard, [ed.], Meister Eckhart and the Béguine Mystics: Hadewijch of Brabant,
Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porète, New York: The
Continuum Publishing Co., 2001
McGinn, Bernard, [ed.] The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, New York: Random
House Publishing, 2006
Murk-Jansen, Saskia, Brides in the Desert: The Spirituality of the Béguines, Eugene,
Oregon: Wipf & Stock Publishing, 1998
Porète, Marguerite, [Author], Babinsky, Ellen, [Translator], The Mirror of Simple Souls, New
York: Paulist Press, 1993
31
Rubin, Miri, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991
Rubin, Miri, In and out of the Ghetto : Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late

Medieval and Early Modern Germany, New York : Cambridge
University Press, 1995
Shinners, John [ed.], Medieval Popular Religion, 1000-15000: A Reader, Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 2008
Simons, Walter, Cities of Ladies: Béguine Communities in the Medieval Low

Countries, 1200-1565, Philadelphia: University of
Philadelphia Press, 2001
Southern, Richard, William, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, Vol. II,
London: Penguin Books, 1990
32

The Sins of Marguerite Porète Religious Women in Medieval Christianity

Încărcat de

Informații document

Descriere originală:

Titlu original

Drepturi de autor

Formate disponibile

Partajați acest document

Partajați sau inserați document

Opțiuni de partajare

Vi se pare util acest document?

Este necorespunzător acest conținut?

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

The Sins of Marguerite Porète Religious Women in Medieval Christianity

Încărcat de

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

THE SINS OF MARGUERITE PORÈTE

RELIGIOUS WOMEN IN MEDIEVAL CHRISTIANITY

denizens of Western Christendom.

power to define as heresy any challenge to normativity 8, in an essentially obligatory system,

between a non-credentialed, non-academic mystic, and the scholastic theologians at Paris” 9. No

one came to her defence.

In medieval Christendom, between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, a revivalist

suited people’s particular experiences in the new economic-social constellation of

circumstances. Innovative interpretations of what it may mean to be Christian arose from a

publicly proclaimed and stubbornly maintained- ceased to be a purely intellectual concern, as

Categorized by the bio-social definitions of female sexuality, as virgins, mothers, widows, or

and... in relation to their capacity to procreate...(Whereas) men’s status...depended primarily on

accorded females characteristics of inherent sinfulness. Women were regarded as temptresses,

their bred-in-the-bone disobedient inclinations. 19 A pseudo-scientific conception of female

movement in antiquity, there had arisen many competing and varied

alternative interpretations and practices of the Christian teachings, some of

eleventh century however marked the beginning of an exceptional flowering of alternative

religious phenomenon in Christendom, the result of a combination of demographic factors and

The Beguine challenge to Church orthodoxy can be framed by gender issues in a

enforced; as well as by the institutional power contests between the communities of

challenge can be theoretically conjured as a tripartite structure, comprised of gender,

unprecedented and audacious appropriation, even usurpation, by women, such as Marguerite,

meaning to the people.

sometime in her youth as a single woman. It is important, albeit not easy, to

contextualize the social background of Marguerite Porète, and we must therefore

resort to some acrobatic conjecture in order to surmise and extrapolate the

Beguine communities were a manifestation of a popular challenge to society’s

definition of women’s roles. Béguines were a special breed of women in the

heresy levelled against them.

intimate relationship with the Eucharist which they regarded as an object of

and not necessarily through the ministrations of the Church.

like Saint Francis could be imagined as the Second Christ58.

Christians, following a transformational vision or experience. They did not claim

Lord, you are my lover,

considered proto-Protestant62. Particularly interesting is the Béguine innovative penchant for

very authority to speak in the name of God.

or do to ignite the pyre of extreme, absolute and irrevocable intolerance?

Grace and attain salvation75.

Marguerite Porète lived in a time of increasing “suspicion toward extra-canonical groups

faithful, to be shepherded by the institution of the Church79.

boldly gendered mysticism addressed to semi-religious women who, in some

Marguerite, in “The Mirror of Simple Souls”, subverted stereotypical gender differences

subordinate to men, particularly to men of the cloth.

Marguerite’s spirituality and by her defiant socio-theological stance 92.

was granted by Divine Grace and predestination.

of emancipation that took root among the people96.

height of contemplation”97. She advocated a rejection of intermediaries and individualized

compounded by the spiritual objectification of women which, to an educated woman like

biologically limited constitution, to interpret Scripture, and were declared by men to be

proclaimed the king naked.

Tournai, a Franciscan master of theology at Paris:

astray” by her “stained...common, vulgar utterance”110.

Bornstein, Daniel, E. [ed.], Medieval Christianity: A People’s History of Christianity,

Bowie, Fiona [ed.], Béguine Spirituality: Mystical Writings of Mechthild of

Cooper, Helen, Canterbury Tales, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996

Rubin, Miri, In and out of the Ghetto : Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late

Shinners, John [ed.], Medieval Popular Religion, 1000-15000: A Reader, Toronto:

Simons, Walter, Cities of Ladies: Béguine Communities in the Medieval Low

S-ar putea să vă placă și