A Diabolical Voice: Heresy and the Reception of the Latin “Mirror of Simple Souls” in Late Medieval Europe

Abstract

Justine L. Tombley’s excellent study A Diabolical Voice: Heresy and the Reception of the Latin “Mirror of Simple Souls” in Late Medieval Europe is the following step in the medieval historian’s groundbreaking output on Marguerite Porète’s Mirror of Simple Souls. This highly focused study offers a comprehensive and insightful discussion of the reception of the Latin text in Italy and Southern Germany in the first decades of the fifteenth century and connects this to some of the extant manuscripts of the Mirror in Latin. Introducing the study is the story of Marguerite Porète’s repeated condemnation as a heretic (in Valenciennes in 1306, and Paris in 1310), the concomitant condemnation of her book as heretical, and her death at the stake on June 1, 1310, as well as a survey of eighty years of scholarship following Romana Guarnieri’s identification, in 1946, of the Mirror of Simple Souls as the text that led to its author’s death. This makes the introduction a concise and impressive state of the art of textual and historical scholarly work on Marguerite and the Mirror in all its surviving versions (the French original and the medieval translations into Latin, Middle Dutch, and Italian), and sets the scene for the detailed analyses of the manuscripts and texts that criticize the Mirror discussed in the following four chapters, of which chapters 2, 3, and 4 are devoted to a single manuscript or text.Chapter 1 describes brief warnings against the Mirror as a worthless, deceptive, and dangerous text in, among others, the sermons of Bernardino of Siena (between 1427 and 1444), letters by Giovanni of Capestrano and Lorenzo Giustiniani, who led an inquisition into heresy in Venice for Eugenius IV, and by Antonio Zeno, who sent a list of propositions from the Mirror to theologians at the University of Padua to be investigated. It also looks into the intriguing mention by the Council of Basel’s historian John of Segovia of an accusation of heresy, including the ownership of a copy of the Mirror, against Eugenius IV himself. Though mostly very brief, these mentions allow Trombley not only to gain insight into the double-faced reception of the Mirror (acceptance–rejection), but also into how the discourse and the ensuing actions against the Mirror are interwoven with conciliar politics. The repeated warnings against the text suggest a wide dissemination among both religious and lay readers, and, as Trombley shows, quite a few of its readers did not see any danger in the text. (A case in point is John-Jerome of Prague, who copied the Mirror in Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, MS Conv. soppr. G.3.1130, and who drew a smiling monk in the decorated initial A at the beginning of the text.) The readers who denounced the Mirror and urged against its dissemination did so independently of the 1306 and 1310 convictions, yet did associate the work with the decree Ad nostrum, written at the Council of Vienne in 1311 and believed to have been partly based on the condemnation of the Mirror as heretical. Their rejection of the text also seems to rest on the belief that it was a founding text for heretical groups and that it led to error and ruin for its adherents.Through Trombley does not go into how specifically “ruin” is to be understood, she carefully analyzes all the instances in which the Mirror is described, decried, confiscated, vandalized, and condemned as a dangerous, diabolical, heretical text in letters and warnings mainly written in Latin, and, as mentioned before, traces the texts and their authors back to a network of clerics around pope Eugenius IV, his mission to eradicate heresy and the themes and controversies surrounding the Councils of Basel and Ferrara-Florence (1431–1449), and to Giacomo de Zocchi, professor of canon law at the university of Padua since 1428, thus uncovering a web of attacks on the Mirror extending from Italy into Germany more than 120 years after its author’s death.Chapter 2 offers the first full codicological analysis of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Latin 46, a manuscript famous in Mirror studies as the only physical evidence of efforts to suppress and destroy the text, as the larger part of the copy was cut out of the manuscript (apart from the opening page written on the verso side of f. 70, and the last eight lines of the text on f. 72r–f. 71 being misbound). An eclectic copy with possible Benedictine origins and suggestive of humanist interests (texts by Seneca and John Chrysostom are included in the codex) on the part of the compiler, this copy is yet another proof of the double-faced reception Trombley is documenting. Someone wanted the Mirror in this collection of texts, yet someone (else?) later decided that the text was problematic and needed to be destroyed. Presenting codicological evidence that points both to Italy and Southern Germany, this chapter presents intriguing scenarios as to where and when the Mirror may have been excised. If this was in Italy, the owner of the manuscript may have been alerted to the heretical nature of the text in one of the inquisitorial campaigns against the text. If in Germany, the owner may have received word of the warnings against the text through the network of Southern German clerics who studied, likely under de Zocchi, at the university of Padua. That the codex was carefully studied for problematic content also shows in “evidence of suspicion and scrutiny” (88) in Angela of Foligno’s Liber and a Pseudo-Augustinian epistle that mentions an apocryphal Origen text, both also included in the collection.Chapter 3 focuses on the list of thirty propositions from the Mirror occurring in Vatican City, BAV, MS Vat. Lat. 4953. As a similar list drawn up for the theologians of Paris in the early fourteenth century does not survive, this list, potentially drawn up to be investigated by the theologians of the university of Padua at the request of Antonio Zeno, helps shed light on the reasons why the Mirror may have been condemned by the Paris theologians, whose refutations may well have been similar to those added to the propositions here. Yet the significance of the list in MS Vat. Lat. 4953 is not just retrospective. As the remaining texts in this codex are all linked to the theological disputes between the Greek and the Latin Churches–the focus of the Council of Ferrara-Florence, Trombley suggests the likelihood of this codex being a handbook to help its owner, most likely someone involved with the papal court, navigate the negotiations at the Council, and of the list having originated in the context of Giovanni of Capestrano’s investigation of heresy in Venice. (Again, the study suggests several possible scenarios.)After a detailed discussion of the possible association of the Mirror and Palamism—a Greek theological view revolving around “the question of the divine attributes and the nature of union between humans and the divine” (99)—and Ferrara-Florence, the chapter includes a detailed discussion of the refutations found in the list. These boil down to objections to five main themes: the special status of the simple, annihilated souls as exempt from normal spiritual practice as taught by the Church, the souls’ indifference to practicing the virtues and to emotions, the idea that the simple souls can experience full union with the divine during their earthly lives, the souls’ complete surrendering of their will to God’s, which would mean that they no longer have free will, and the Mirror’s insistence on the “unknowability” of God.A Diabolical Voice closes with the discussion of Padua, Biblioteca universitaria di Padova, MS 1647, a fifteenth-century codex that contains a seven-folio text that denounces excerpted passages of the Mirror as heretical and the book as a whole as diabolical. This manuscript and text are discussed at the end of the monograph, because the polemic is a fifteenth-century copy by Padua theologian Giacomo de Zocchi of a much earlier text, possibly written before the 1306 and 1310 condemnations of the Mirror, and most likely before the Council of Vienne, as the canon lawyer who writes the text does not refer to Ad nostrum in his refutations. As this author quotes from the Latin translation, this also pushes the terminus ante quem of the Latin translation back to the end of the thirteenth century. The early fourteenth-century original of the mid-fifteenth-century copy found here was, thus, contemporary with but independent of the investigation of the Mirror by the Paris theologians that led to Marguerite’s execution.Interestingly, this attack on the Mirror assumes that the work was written by a man and formulates an appraisal of the work in virulently hostile language that leads, as Trombley points out, to a condemnation that reads as if it is a verdict in a heresy trial. The themes picked up for refutation by this author are the same ones as those singled out by the compiler of the list of propositions in MS Vat. Lat. 4953: the soul’s indifference to moral guidance and its rejection of Christian works and practices, its proclaimed ability to gain knowledge of God without Church teachings, and the deification of the soul in mystical union.In addressing the concerns about and attacks against the Mirror in Italian and Southern German sources in the second quarter of the fifteenth century, this monograph complements and adds nuance to the narrative of the Mirror’s successful, if not triumphant, survival often, if not predominantly, highlighted in Marguerite scholarship. Thus, this book truly fills a gap in our knowledge about the Mirror and its medieval reception. Not only does Trombley uncover the intricate connections between people and texts that created this web of references to and judgments of the Mirror, she also shows how their concerns fit into the late medieval spiritual upheaval that shows in an explosive increase in lay and religious interest in the contemplative life, but also in fears of heresy through revelations and visions, and of new reform movements in the Church and monastic orders. The study hints at the uses of texts and condemnations of them as church-political moves, and at the clash between mystical experience expressed in literary form with doctrinal theology and canon law. Above all, it shows how two opposite assessments of a text coexisted and how important nuance is in academic research. Whether or not the Mirror was heretical is not the question Trombley asks in this book. Rather, she asks “whether medieval readers believed the text was heretical” (24). Some of them did, and others did not.The detail with which Trombley clarifies the many theological, doctrinal, and historical issues surrounding the texts she analyzes in the book cannot be conveyed in a review. As a reader, you are thinking along with the author, and I found myself eager to find out what the next step in the journey of discovery through these texts and manuscripts would be. The completeness in Trombley’s description of the various connections between the texts and the careful listing of the different scenarios of text production and exchange make the reading of this study a highly satisfying intellectual experience that this review cannot do justice to. Trombley also offers complete and detailed descriptions of the manuscripts in chapters 2, 3, and 4. The texts from MS Vat. Lat. 4953 and Biblioteca universitaria di Padova, MS 1647 are translated by Trombley and added in the two appendixes to the book, opening them up for future work. The bibliography is extensive and an invitation to further reading. This is an incredibly rich book for scholars of the Mirror, and as such it is an invaluable addition to the field. Also, it is a riveting read for any scholar of medieval religious cultures, be they historians, theologians, or literary scholars, even when the stress is on the historical. The importance of this book for anyone studying whatever aspect of the Mirror cannot be stressed enough.