| This dissertation traces the intellectual and cultural lineage of Marguerite Porete's late thirteenth-century text, the Mirouer des simples ames, to reveal its purpose as a tool for spiritual practice. By exploring Porete's engagement with Old French literature, sermons, dialogue, and poetry, I demonstrate her didactic approach to spiritual transformation. Drawing on the trope of annihilation in the monastic tradition, Porete creates a theological guidebook that emphasizes a novel conception of the annihilated soul ( ame anéantie) as object and locus of transformation. The examination of hitherto neglected technical language uncovers a model of intellection that demonstrates the influence of scholastic concepts on Porete's thought. Porete models the journey of the annihilated soul on the Neoplatonic paradigm of the created entity returning to its source and borrows themes from the work of pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite to provide the soul with a method for coming to God. Furthermore Porete's religious practice relies on the repetition of spiritual exercises, entailing an understanding of salvation dependent not on obtaining eternal life after death but on the present. This dissertation takes our understanding of the Mirror beyond the traditional interpretation of it as inspired by vernacular love lyric and contributes to reframing both the role of women in the medieval community of knowledge and the intellectual rigor of lay elite spirituality. |
