Marguerite Porete Quotes on Love

Marguerite Porete (c.1250–1310) — the Beguine mystic burned at the stake in Paris in 1310 for refusing to withdraw the Mirror of Simple Souls (Le Mirouer des simples âmes) — gave early fourteenth-century French and Brabantine mystical writing one of its most radical statements of disinterested love. The dialogue between Lady Love, Lady Reason, and the Soul develops the seven stages by which the soul is annihilated into the divine: the soul that has become free and noble has nothing to want, since the will of love and the will of God have become indistinguishable, and the truly free soul has passed beyond the moral and devotional practices of the lesser holy church. The framework, transmitted clandestinely for centuries before its modern recovery, shaped the twentieth-century study of Beguine spirituality through Bernard McGinn, Amy Hollywood, and the broader feminist medievalist scholarship.