In 1309 ecclesiastical leaders condemned as heresy Marguerite Porete's rejection of moral duty, her doctrine that “the annihilated soul is freed from the virtues.”1 They also condemned her book, the Mirror of Simple Souls, which includes doctrines associated decades earlier with a “new spirit” heresy spreading “blasphemies” such as that “a person can become God” because “a soul united to God is made divine.”2 In his study, The Heresy of the Free Spirit, Robert E. Lerner identifies these two doctrines of annihilation and deification as characteristic of the “free spirit” heresy condemned at the 1311 Council of Vienne. The council claimed that this heresy's sympathizers belonged to an “abominable sect of certain evil men known as beghards and some faithless women called beguines.”3 Lerner found that this group was composed of a disproportionate number of women, including Marguerite Porete. Many of the men were also involved with the group of pious laywomen known as beguines.4 Lerner shows that among those charged with heresy, many sympathized with a “ ‘free-spirit style’ of affective mysticism particularly congenial to thirteenth century religious women.”5 He suggests that beguines in particular radicalized affective spirituality into what he calls an “extreme mysticism.”6 Here I wish to follow Lerner's suggestion that we ought to search for the roots of Porete's doctrines among the beguines. I will argue that distinctive doctrines of annihilation and deification sprouted from a fertile beguine imagination, one that nourished Porete's own distinctive and influential ideas in the Mirror of Simple Souls.7 It is among the beguines that we find the first instance in Christianity of a women's community creating an original form of theological discourse.
