THE MIRROR OF SIMPLE SOULS: CIRCULATION AND CONTINUATION

        Even though all copies of the Mirror were ordered to be burned, the text survived, and continued to circulate without its author. As of today, there are now just over sixteen known copies of the Mirror from as early as the fourteenth century in translations from the original Old French into Middle French, Middle English, Latin, and Italian (Lambert 132; Kocher 25). Such manuscripts have given scholars the ability to track the circulation of the text, and give clues as to how it was received in other, later contexts. One of these known manuscripts was found in the inventory of a late fifteenth century French apothecary, listed among other books of different subjects such as pharmacology, astrology, botany, and literature (Kocher 23). Another found in England is dated from the early fifteenth century, and was heavily glossed by an anonymous, possibly by a Carthusian monk known as “M.N.” (Heffernan 64-65). Within the past few years, yet another copy has been found, this time in Germany, a region that until now has not been considered part of the Mirror’s area of circulation, widening the circle of the text’s influence (Trombley 158).

Considering these texts would have been written down, translated, and circulated by hand, the scope of its reach is quite impressive. There is even evidence that some of these known manuscripts are connected. Both Robert Lerner and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton track the movement of Phillipa of Hainaut from Valenciennes to England in 1327 to marry Edward III; both scholars posit that she may have brought over a Middle French copy of the Mirror, which then could have spread from her own circle in the English court outward to other layfolk of England, including to monasteries, where it could have been taken up by monks for translating (Lerner 105; Kerby-Fulton 293). Likely, these new readers to the Mirror would have been unaware of its controversial past–there is no identification in the texts that survived and were translated after the final burning of the Mirror and Marguerite, as evidenced by the multiple copies that now exist. But such a scope suggests a wide audience of people from all different groups: from those in religious communities, to the layfolk of cities, even to royalty. However, even without attachment to a violent past, the Mirror of Simple Souls still caused controversy.

Kerby-Fulton highlights the suspicion around the Mirror as evidenced by M.N.’s translation and glosses of the text. She notes that even in the sixteenth-century the text still caused reservation in clergymen like the Carthusian monk Richard Methley, who also translated the Mirror into Latin from the Middle English, and gave it his own set of glosses in order to make it more appropriate for the unlearned that might come into contact with the book (275). However, M.N.'s version of the text is, for the focus of this essay, much more interesting because, like the original text, it is in the vernacular of its region: Middle English. In a time when those associated with the Church or government generally only read and wrote in Latin, the vernacular language of a region implies a text’s readership was likely simple layfolk who had an interest in religion, among other subjects, like the French apothecary mentioned earlier. To cater to this group, M.N. translated and glossed a version of the Mirror in order to help guide its readers to appreciate the text in the “right” way, changing the meaning ever so slightly so as to keep it within the confines of orthodox (Kerby-Fulton 276).^[1] 

The anxiety around the text and its messages would continue on from the fourteenth century to the modern era, even without the attachment of a woman heretic as the author of the text. The anonymity of its author would also continue until 1946, when Romana Guarnieri made the connection between the trial documents that survived from Marguerite’s time in front of William of Paris, and passages quoted in Jean Gerson’s text On the Distinction of True Revelations from False about the work of one “Marie of Valenciennes,” whom Guarnieri believed to actually be Marguerite Porete (Brown 694-695).^[2] This revelation changed everything about the way the text was read in scholarly circles. This can be seen in simply searching “Marguerite Porete” in any literary database–hundreds of works will come up. And yet, only recently has work begun on the book history of the Mirror of Simple Souls. Although the scholarship that has come out on the surviving manuscripts themselves is always aware of the author’s history, little has connected the two aspects of the text in a more than surface level way.