The Afterlives of Marguerite Porete : From Heretic to Author

This book considers the invisibility of women authors and scholars by examining the case of condemned heretic Marguerite Porete, burned in Paris’s Place de Grève in 1310.

It traces the rediscovery of the beguine heretic by French historians in the sixteenth century and the post-medieval transformation of her memory from heretic to hero in previously unexamined accounts of historians, literary authors, and political activists through to the nineteenth century. Initially portrayed as the corrupt leader of the heretical beguines – lay religious women condemned by the Council of Vienne (1311–1312) – Marguerite Porete was eventually celebrated as a freethinker and harbinger of female emancipation. Though her burning in Paris’s central square had made her a well-known figure by the nineteenth century, her actual work as an author remained invisible until 1946, when Romana Guarnieri ascribed to her the authorship of The Mirror of Simple Souls, the first mystical treatise written in French.

Religion studies professor Danielle C. Dubois considers Guarnieri’s field-shifting scholarship and the ensuing twentieth-century portrayals of Marguerite Porete, including the recent dedication of the Place Marguerite Porete, not far from the site of her burning. The Afterlives of Marguerite Porete is thus a case study on the systemic omission of women writers across time.