A look into the surviving physical copies of one woman's controversial text
Much has been written about the text of The Mirror of Simple Souls, but it is only recently that scholarship has turned toward the few surviving 15th and 16th century physical copies. Held in several different collections across Europe and in varying states of completion, the books themselves tell us about how the text was received by these early modern audiences, like who was reading them and what they thought about the text. The text, originally written in the thirteenth century, was circulated around Europe despite the order of Marguerite’s persecutors for all copies to be burned in the early fourteenth century. Since then, the text has been translated into Middle English, Modern English, Middle French, Modern French, Italian, and Latin. During its circulation in these different languages however, the Mirror’s author was unknown to its audiences until 1946, when Romana Guarnieri made the connection between the text and the trial documents recording Marguerite’s execution. This project will study the life of Marguerite Porete as we know it, and examine the introductions of the 1927 and 1999 copies, both translated into English from different languages (Middle English and Latin, respectively). After the revelation of the author as the woman mystic Marguerite Porete, the reading of the text changed completely, but how did the physicality of the text change? The purpose of this project is to propose more research into the book history of the Mirror of Simple Souls, and to closely examine the multiple editions of the text in order to view the differences between its circulation during the fifteenth century, its continuation through time, and how it is known today in the twenty-first century.
