INTRODUCTION

        Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls has been circulated since the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. It has made its way from Valenciennes, where Marguerite’s life ended, all the way across Europe and today it is known worldwide. However, for most of its time in circulation, it was thought to have been written by an anonymous male mystic. The content of the text is mysterious, at times confusing. Marguerite employed many traditional romance tropes in her writing of the soul’s relationship with God, but the level of spirituality in which these tropes were engaged makes the text difficult to fully grasp. For most laypeople, it would have been a challenging text; even well known theologians cautioned against its use by unpracticed individuals. The text’s complexity would lead to its downfall: it was condemned as heretical, as capable of leading untrained laypeople astray from the church. This was despite those who saw it as a complicated, yet beautiful discussion on what it meant to truly know God, even if this meant it was only approved for theologians or other church folk of higher orders to read. In other words, the text was powerful, and held power for centuries after its author was lost to the flames.

        In 1946, the book’s power grew even more. Romana Guarnieri made the crucial connection between the Mirror and the text condemned to be burned along with its author at Valenciennes in the early fourteenth century through her examination of the trial documents held in the Vatican’s archives. This discovery changed everything about the text and the way it was read. Scholars for years after this discovery was made returned to the text, identifying Marguerite to be the only known woman mystic to be burned alongside her book. The editions that had already existed, those from the fifteenth century to the modern day, took on a completely different light. While much scholarship has been done on the analysis of the text itself, its romance traditions and what exactly made it heretical, there is a considerable gap in the scholarship done about the book as an object. More and more scholars are just now beginning to prioritize this aspect of the text and its history. Yet still more needs to be done. The idea of this paper is to examine the differences in editions of the book as object, especially the differences between book editions that came before and after Guarnieri’s discovery.