We know very little about Marguerite Porete, only that she was a beguine from Hainaut who was burned at the stake as a relapsed heretic in 1310. She might have been a solitary itinerant beguine who expounded her teachings to interested listeners.

When Dr. Romana Guarnieri, in a letter to Osservatore Romano (16 June 1946), announced her discovery that Margaret Porette (d. 1 June 1310) was the author of The Mirror of Simple Souls, certainly a major French document of pre-Reformation spirituality, a sensation was created in the academic world. Although The Mirror is one of the few heretical documents to have survived the Middle Ages in its entirety, both its title and its authorship were among the most persistent and troublesome problems of scholarly research in the field of medieval vernacular languages. The Mirror, in its original French, survives only in the fifteenth-century manuscript which the great Condé (Louis II de Bourbon) had acquired for his palace at Chantilly. And, so far as can be known, all that remains with which to compare the readings of this manuscript text are those translations of The Mirror which, also in manuscript, are to be found in Latin, Italian, and Middle English. This edition of The Mirror of Simple Souls is a translation from the French original with interpretive essays by Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., Judith Grant, and J.C. Marler, and a foreword by Kent Emery, Jr. The translators of this Modern English version rely primarily on the French, yet take other medieval translations into account. As a result, this edition offers a reading of The Mirror which solves a number of difficulties found in the French, and the introductions contributed by the translators narrate the archival history of the book, for which Margaret Porette was burned alive in Paris in 1310.

Even with growing popularity in the United States, there existed no English-language scholarly introduction to Marguerite Porete or her sole-surviving work Mirror of Simple Souls until now. The study of Marguerite and her work touches on so many disciplines – from religious and secular histories to theological and literary readings of her book – that the scholarship had often been lost in the divides between the disciplines. Our contributors are chosen from both sides of the Atlantic and from an array of disciplines in order to bridge this geographical and linguistic divide. The interdisciplinary nature of the interest in Marguerite and the Mirror and the implications her book has on medieval scholarship make a collection such as this companion ideal. Contributors are Marleen Cré, Imke De Gier, Dávid Falvay, Sean Field, Geneviève Hasenohr (with Zan Kocher), Jonathan Juilfs, Zan Kocher, Joanne Robinson, Elizabeth Scarborough, Robert Stauffer, Wendy R. Terry, and Justine Trombley.

This first book-length study of Marguerite Porete's important mystical text, The Mirror of Simple Souls, examines Porete's esoteric and optimistic doctrine of annihilation—the complete transformative union of the soul into God—in its philosophical and historical contexts. Porete was burned at the stake as a relapsed heretic in 1310. Her theological treatise survived the flames, but it circulated anonymously or under male pseudonyms until 1946, and her message endures as testament to a distinctive form of medieval spirituality. Robinson begins by focusing on traditional speculations regarding the origin, nature, limitations, and destiny of humankind. She then examines Porete's work in its more immediate historical and literary contexts, focusing on the ways in which Porete conceptualizes and expresses her radical doctrine of annihilation through contemporary metaphors of lineage and nobility.

Medieval Women: Texts Contexts

This volume explores medieval anchoritism (the life of a solitary religious recluse) from a variety of perspectives. The individual essays conceive anchoritism in broadly interpretive categories: challenging perceived notions of the very concept of anchoritic ‘rule’ and guidance; studying the interaction between language and linguistic forms; addressing the connection between anchoritism and other forms of solitude (particularly in European tales of sanctity); and exploring the influence of anchoritic literature on lay devotion. As a whole, the volume illuminates the richness and fluidity of anchoritic texts and contexts and shows how anchoritism pervaded the spirituality of the Middle Ages, for lay and religious alike. It moves through both space and time, ranging from the third century to the sixteenth, from England to the Continent and back.

本书以欧洲中世纪晚期（13-15世纪）最具有代表性的四位女性俗语作家为研究对象。首先，通过对三位贝居因修女梅希蒂尔德、海德薇希和玛格丽特·波蕾特的宗教作品的研究，来探讨中世纪晚期的女性神秘主义者如何借助新兴的俗语神学思潮，来为宗教信仰领域的边缘人争取话语权；其次，克里斯蒂娜·德·皮桑做为中世纪晚期最重要的世俗女作家，本书对皮桑创作的一系列涉及性别问题和政治问题的作品进行分析和解读。

Adamsom offers a lively and accessible tour through 600 years of intellectual history, offering a feast of new ideas in every area of philosophy. He introduces us to some of the greatest thinkers of the Western tradition including Abelard, Anselm, Aquinas, Hildegard of Bingen, and Julian of Norwich.

The sacred and the secular in medieval literature have too often been perceived as opposites, or else relegated to separate but unequal spheres. In Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred, Barbara Newman offers a new approach to the many ways that sacred and secular interact in medieval literature, arguing that (in contrast to our own cultural situation) the sacred was the normative, unmarked default category against which the secular always had to define itself and establish its niche. Newman refers to this dialectical relationship as "crossover"—which is not a genre in itself, but a mode of interaction, an openness to the meeting or even merger of sacred and secular in a wide variety of forms. Newman sketches a few of the principles that shape their interaction: the hermeneutics of "both/and," the principle of double judgment, the confluence of pagan material and Christian meaning in Arthurian romance, the rule of convergent idealism in hagiographic romance, and the double-edged sword in parody. Medieval Crossover explores a wealth of case studies in French, English, and Latin texts that concentrate on instances of paradox, collision, and convergence. Newman convincingly and with great clarity demonstrates the widespread applicability of the crossover concept as an analytical tool, examining some very disparate works. These include French and English romances about Lancelot and the Grail; the mystical writing of Marguerite Porete (placed in the context of lay spirituality, lyric traditions, and the Romance of the Rose); multiple examples of parody (sexually obscene, shockingly anti-Semitic, or cleverly litigious); and René of Anjou's two allegorical dream visions. Some of these texts are scarcely known to medievalists; others are rarely studied together. Newman's originality in her choice of these primary works will inspire new questions and set in motion new fields of exploration for medievalists working in a large variety of disciplines, including literature, religious studies, history, and cultural studies.