MANUSCRIPT COPIES: DESTRUCTION AND SURVIVAL

        The surviving copies of The Mirror of Simple Souls discussed above are in varying forms of completeness (Kocher 25). Some of this is simply due to time taking its toll on centuries old manuscripts, but some, as Kerby-Fulton describes, display physical acts of violence on the text: “in a fifteenth-century Bodleian Library copy of the Latin translation (a copy in England at least by 1637), the text is completely and deliberately torn out, the first page alone surviving because a text by Lulle was written on the recto” (276). This being done even before the author was known to be a woman heretic emphasizes just how dangerous this text was considered, even centuries after it was originally written. Even with the original violence of burning the book and its author at the stake, the text survived to suffer yet more violence acted against it. While its original persecutors may not have succeeded in completely erasing the text and Marguerite from history, for a significant amount of time, their actions in 1310 allowed for the continuation of violence and erasure, whether or not later scholars knew they were participating in this legacy.

        A prime example of this erasure is Clare Kirchberger’s introduction to the 1927 edition of The Mirror of Simple Souls. In this introduction, Kirchberger (who this paper somewhat ironically echoes in its own opening) states that “We cannot determine with any exactness who was the author of the Mirror” (Kirchberger xxix). She goes on to cite the scholar who discovered the manuscript in 1911, who “conjectured that he may have been a secular priest or a Carthusian…” (xxix, emphasis added). The entire introduction of this edition refers to the now widely known woman author as a man that was part of a monastic community; Marguerite’s persecutors’ legacy was still active well into the twentieth-century. However, the knowledge that the text was controversial was, in some way, known through the notes from the three men Marguerite showed her book to before her second trial because of the notes before the Mirror from Godfrey of Fontaines and the Cistercian and Franciscan monks. Kirchberger then states that the author’s book “must have been carefully guarded…for no trace of the vernacular version is to be found this day” (xxxii). This, to a modern and knowledgeable reader, displays evidence of the success of Marguerite’s executioners in destroying the original copies of the Mirror, suggesting that all other circulating editions are likely translations made from translations, the Old French text completely lost to us. To look back on this introduction knowing that the author was a woman condemned for the text it is introducing, the reading changes completely.When compared with the 1999 edition, Kirchberger’s introduction pales completely, for obvious reasons. But some of the facts remain the same; Kirchberger was not totally off base in her theories about the author, even with the limited knowledge of her time. The 1999 introduction displays much more knowledge about Marguerite and her text, which is to be expected decades after Guarnieri’s initial discovery and publication. It is even titled an “Introductory Interpretive Essay,” which connotes the amount of research that has gone into the text and what it means. Yet even with its much more in depth background analysis of Marguerite as a person and the history of her text, it takes little notice of the book as an object. Indeed, it is only in recent years that a book historical approach has been taken seriously for The Mirror of Simple Souls.