Marguerite Porete c. 1250 – 1310

Marguerite Porete was a French Christian mystic, beguine, and the author of the Mirror of Simple Souls, one of the most daring works of medieval mystical theology. The book, written in Old French, traces the soul's progressive annihilation in the love of God until it reaches a state of unmediated union in which the will ceases to be its own. Condemned at Valenciennes and again at Paris, where she refused to retract or to answer the inquisitors, she was burned at the stake in the Place de Greve in 1310. Her book circulated anonymously for centuries and was decisively re-attributed to her only in the twentieth century.