In the spring of 1310, a woman stood in a public square in Paris and waited for the fire to be lit beneath her feet.
Her name was Marguerite Porete.
She had not led an army. She had not plotted against a king. She had written a book.
The flames did not win. They rarely do. More than 700 years later, people are still reading her words.
Which tells us something about the unique durability of love.
Porete was born sometime in the mid-thirteenth century in what is now Belgium. She became associated with a movement known as the Beguines — women who lived in religious community without taking permanent monastic vows. They prayed, worked, supported themselves and served the poor. They were neither wives nor cloistered nuns. They occupied a space that institutions often find difficult to categorize or comprehend. They served simply because they wished to serve as a purified demonstration of their faith, not because they had a vow they were compelled to uphold or a hierarchy that demanded obedience.
Porete’s book was entitled “The Mirror of Simple Souls.” What made it unusual was not only its mystical theology but its language. She wrote it in Old French, the language of ordinary people, rather than Latin.
Porete was not whispering mystical ideas inside a monastery. She was inviting them to step onto the streets.
The book unfolds as a dialogue between three figures named Love, Reason and the Soul. It describes a spiritual journey in which the human soul gradually releases its tight grip on ego and becomes transformed by divine love.
Her central claim was both simple and unsettling: when a soul is fully united with Divine Love, it becomes free.
Not free to do whatever it pleases, but free from the small, anxious self that clings, competes and fears. A soul shaped by love, she suggested, no longer acts from selfish will.
To some theologians, this sounded dangerous.
The bishop of Cambrai condemned the book and ordered it burned. Porete herself was commanded not to circulate it again. She continued sharing it anyway.
She was eventually arrested, imprisoned and brought before the Inquisition in Paris. During much of her trial, she reportedly refused to answer the theologians’ questions. Silence, in that setting, was treated as defiance. But quite possibly she felt she could not dignify their questions with a response, for there was nothing whatsoever to defend. After refusing to recant, she was declared a relapsed heretic and sentenced to death. On June 1, 1310, she was burned at the stake.
A chronicler, though disagreeing with her theology, still recorded something striking: the crowd watching her execution was moved to tears. Her dignity and composure in the face of death left an impression even on those who believed her ideas were dangerous.
Authorities attempted to erase her voice. Instead, her book quietly traveled across Europe. It was copied and translated into Latin, Italian and Middle English. For centuries the work circulated anonymously until the twentieth-century scholar Romana Guarnieri identified Marguerite Porete as its author, restoring her name to the text.
The idea Porete died defending was not uniquely hers. It appears again and again across cultures and spiritual traditions: the intuition that the deepest transformation of the human soul happens when the ego loosens and love takes its place.
Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart spoke of the “birth of God in the soul.” Eastern Christian theology developed the idea of theosis — participation in divine life.
In Sufi Islam, poets such as Rumi described the dissolution of the self in the “Beloved.”
In Hindu philosophy, particularly Advaita Vedanta, the deepest self is said to awaken to its unity with ultimate reality.
In Mahayana Buddhism, the realization that the self is not separate from others gives rise to boundless compassion.
And in Jewish Hasidic spirituality, the concept of devekut describes cleaving to God so closely that one’s life flows from divine presence.
Different languages. Different metaphors. But often the same movement: the shrinking of ego and the widening of love.
Across centuries, mystics keep stumbling onto this same discovery. Institutions, understandably, sometimes grow cautious when individuals claim direct experience of the divine. Traditions develop boundaries to protect their interpretations — interpretations that, historically, have often been shaped by male authority.
Women’s History Month invites us to recover names that history tried to forget. Marguerite Porete is one of them.
But remembering women like her is not just about biography. It is about theology. When women’s voices are silenced, entire ways of understanding the sacred disappear with them.
Mystical insight has often traveled through unexpected messengers — through poets, servants, wanderers, and women who refused to stay quiet.
Porete’s death was meant to close a chapter. Instead, it became a testimony with legs strong enough to traverse centuries.
We live in a time when many people feel both spiritually curious and institutionally wary. That tension can make faith appear untrustworthy. But Porete’s story reminds us that this is not a new dilemma. The dance between authority and experience has always been part of religious life.
You can burn a manuscript. You can condemn an idea. You can even execute the person who wrote it. But the human drive to belong to something larger than fear has proven extraordinarily difficult to extinguish.
Marguerite Porete stood in a public square and refused to retract her words about love. Mystics in other lands and other languages have echoed similarly dangerous truths throughout history. Yet still we are reading them.
And if love can survive inquisitions, empires, misunderstandings, and even murder, perhaps it can survive us, too — long enough to help shape a gentler future than fear will ever build on its own.
Wil Darcangelo, M.Div, is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister of the First Church of Lancaster at the Bulfinch Meetinghouse in Massachusetts, progressive theologian and essayist on optimistic spirituality in the Information Age. Follow him on Substack, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.