دانلود کتاب ’Ce livre monstrera a tous vraye lumier de verité’ Marguerite Porete’s "Le mirouer des simples ames" as a mystagogic text

The medieval mystic and writer Marguerite Porete was burned as a heretic by the Inquisition in Paris on 1 June, 1310. This study concentrates less on the dramatic circumstances of her death, than on the text of the book she wrote which lead to her condemnation. Despite the church's ban on the dissemination of Marguerite Porete's Le Mirouer des simples ames (The Mirror of Simple Souls), it was preserved in various European languages and enjoyed a relatively widespread transmission.

As a book, the Mirouer is anything but easy to read. 'Unsystematic' and 'incoherent' is how some early Marguerite Porete scholars have described it. The book exists in the form of a dialogue between allegorical personificaties - Amour, Raison, L'Ame, Les Vertuz, Foi and many more – who enter into conversation with each other about the union of the soul with God. The text is full of contradictions and paradoxes. The key mystical term within the text is that of anéantissement ('annihilation'), the reduction of the soul to nothingness so that the divine can be manifested there.

Rather than approaching the book from expectations contemporary readers may have, this research departs from a medieval vision of the performative ability the 'agency' - of the spoken word within a text. To that end the text is approached from three perspectives: the use and connotations of the word livre ('book'); the performative manner in which language is used; the employment of personification. This study clarifies how the Mirouer could have functioned as a mystagogic (mystical-pedagogical) instrument aiding its audience in reaching the mystical state of 'annihilation'. The textual analysis undertaken is carried out through lexical and semantic investigations on the one hand, and concepts from contemporary discourse analysis (Bakhtin and de Certeau) on the other. This study brings to the fore patterns and evolutions in the text that have, until now, gone unnoticed or undetected. Furthermore, it reveals the importance of the extent to which the oral transmission of texts and orality was embedded within medieval vernacular literature.