Allegories of Love in Marguerite Porete's "Mirror of Simple Souls"

Description

Marguerite Porete's 'Mirror of Simple Souls', dating probably to the 1290s, is the oldest known mystical work written in French, and the only surviving medieval text by a woman writer executed as a heretic. This volume analyses its use of interconnected allegories that describe the soul's approach toward God in terms of human social relationships. These include romantic love between lovers in same-sex and mixed-sex pairs, relations among people of differing social rank such as servants and nobles, and rich and poor engaged in economic transactions such as taxation and gift-giving. Gender, rank, and exchange serve as remarkably versatile allegories for spiritual states. Porete uses comparison as an organizing principle that underlies her supple and creative use of allegory, personification, parables, metaphors, similes, proverbs, and glosses. The theologian invites her audience to cross boundaries among literal and figurative registers of meaning, in ways that are emblematic of the soul's ultimate leap toward the divine. Porete's social allegories, the author contends, can provide us with valuable evidence of a medieval thinker's conceptions of God, gender, language, and human capacity for change. Acknowledgements ix Introduction: Social Analogies for Mystical Theology 1 Chapter 1: Marguerite Porete’s Life and Book 21 Chapter 2: Gender in the Religious Allegory of Love: From Active Women to Passive Souls 81 Chapter 3: From Spiritual Servitude to Freedom: The Allegory of Social Rank 107 Chapter 4: Wealth, Poverty, and the Allegory of Economic Exchange 127 Chapter 5: Models of Interpretation: Allegory, Comparisons, and the Making of Meaning 147 Chapter 6: The Functions of Allegory in the 'Mirror of Simple Souls' 165 Chapter 7: Conclusions: Mysticism, Allegory, and a Medieval Concept of the Self 177 Bibliography 191 Index 20