Marguerite Porete

Marguerite was burned at the stake for heresy.   I think the real issue was control of women by ecclesiastical men.  First, Marguerite was among a group of women who called themselves Beguines.  They were laywomen, single, who opted out of taking vows or living in an appproved ecclesiastical structure.  They wanted to live quiet lives of devotion under their own rules.  The church preferred such women to be cloistered in monasteries.  Second, she wrote a book A Mirror For Simple Souls.  I read it and it is good.  But she was judged to be propagating a spirituality that dispensed with the Church in favor of direct communion with God.  The Inquisitors did not like that at all.  Marguerite was focusing on contemplative prayer which is direct communion with God.  She was not downgrading sacraments.  She was highlighting something that has been part of the Church prayer life since Jesus.  Marguerite had no religious order behind her, to defend her.  She was a women alone opposed by men who wanted her in a box they could control.  She died in 1310, which was about 200 years before the Reformation.