1. Joanne Maquire Robinson offers several texts (in translation) in an appendix about the interrogation and censure and the 1309 Paris condemnation of Porete (including the first and fifteenth articles from the Mirror singled out for special blame), followed by the 1311 Council of Vienne bull “Ad Nostrum” against eight “Free Spirit” doctrines of the “Brethren” (a second bull at Vienne, “Cum de quisdum mulieribus,” not included in Robinson, criticized the beguines). See Nobility and Annihilation in Marguerite Porete’s “Mirror of Simple Souls,” SUNY Series in Western Esoteric Traditions (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 109–10. But see also the full discussion by Robert E. Lerner, in Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 68–78, who believes there is no evidence that this brotherhood existed; and the extant documents for both the trial against Porete and Guiard in the excellent
2. Paul Verdeyen, “Le Procès d’inquisition contre Marguerite Porete et Guiarde de Cressonessart (1309–1310),” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 81.1–2 (1986): 47–94. Apparently the official heretical charges have not survived, although Richard Methley’s glosses on his Latin translation of the Middle English version in 1491 convinced Edmund Colledge and Romana Guarnieri that Methley—a vicar at Mount Grace Charterhouse in north Yorkshire—may have seen the specific articles because of his justification of Porete’s text through a figurative reading: see his glosses in Colledge and Guarnieri’s “Glosses of ‘M.N.’ and Richard Methley to The Mirror of Simple Souls,” Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà 5 (1968): 357–82. See also the discussion of the investigation as summarized in
3. Maria Lichtmann, “Marguerite Porete’s Mirror for Simple Souls: Inverted Reflection of Self, Society, and God,” Studia mystica 16 (1995): 15–20 [4–29]; this article was revised and published as “‘Marguerite Porete and Meister Eckhart: The Mirror of Simple Souls Mirrored,” in Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics: Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete, ed. Bernard McGinn (New York: Continuum, 1994), 65–86. For gender issues in the charges, see Michael G. Sargent, “The Annihilation of Marguerite Porete,” Viator 28 (1997): 253–79.
4. See Lerner, Heresy of the Free Spirit, 1–2, 200–208; and John A. Arsenault, “Authority, Autonomy, and Antinominianism: The Mysticism and Ethical Piety of Marguerite Porete in The Mirror of Simple Souls,” Studia Mystica, n.s., 21 (2000): 65–94. See also Eleanor McLaughlin on the heresy of the
5. Free Spirit: “The Heresy of the Free Spirit and Late Medieval Mysticism,” Medieval and Renaissance Spirituality 4 (1973): 37–54. Medieval cases of the Brethren of the Free Spirit are enumerated in the first part of