Navigating the labyrinthine text of Porete's Mirror

This is a study of the fourteenth-century mystical text The Mirror of Simple Souls. It argues that rather than looking for one hermeneutical key to unlock this work, it is more fruitful to think of it as containing different but related mystical pathways. The Mirror of Simple Souls has, since 1946, been attributed to Marguerite Porete, who was condemned and burnt as a heretic in Paris in 1310. Scholars have disputed whether the text that has come down to us was all composed by her; chapters 120ff in particular, are in a different style, such that Michael Sells, for example, does not consider it part of the original and excludes it from his analysis; a similar position is taken here. This study focuses on style and the linguistic pirouettes that are performed in The Mirror up until chapter 119. It finds three different spiritual pathways in three consecutive sections of the text. This is not to suggest that there is no overlap between these sections and their pathways, but to indicate that there may be alternative routes through it. This maybe also hint at more than one ‘Porete’ at work. This would not be out of keeping with the way women in communities wrote in this period; it is certainly true of Helfta. While identifying such hands is beyond the scope of the study, it seeks to give further grounds for their possibility.

With this in mind, this study employs two structuring devices. It firstly suggests that the text is best understood as labyrinthine, a feature which has left its mark on the scholarly literature that has emerged in relation to it. Secondly, the study borrows Bruce Tuckman’s thinking on group dynamics and their management, using it as a heuristic tool. Tuckman sets out to outline the movements that groups go through, from their initial start-up until their eventual decline. He moots that they move from ‘forming’ to ‘storming’, through ‘norming’ and ‘performing’ and finally ‘adjourning’. The study suggests that in relation to its complex theological forming (discussed in chapter 2), three main key pathways can be identified (it does not deny the possibility of others), which provide evidence of such dynamics at play: storming in chapter 3-57 of the Mirror (discussed in chapter 3 of this study, which focuses on rhetoric and performative language), norming in chapters 58-91 of the Mirror (discussed in chapter 4 of this study, which focuses on allegory and allegoresis) and performing in chapters 92-119 of the Mirror (discussed in chapter 5 of this study, which focuses on a movement from noise into silence). The study turns finally to a kind of adjourning (discussed in the Epilogue) by offering some brief reflections on authorship, and the closing chapters of the Mirror. While this model might at first seem anachronistic, the Mirror is a communal work, at the very least written for a communal performance with reader and auditors (a point on which the study comments). This suggests that a lens that takes group dynamics and performativity into account is not wholly out of place. Throughout, this study emphasises that the Mirror is a performative text, one designed to be performed through and within the lives of its hearers, and that these pathways contribute to our sense of this performativity, culminating in a final movement in 92-119.