abstract: In 1999, Geneviève Hasenohr announced the discovery of a fragment of Marguerite Porete's Mirouer des Simples Ames, a work condemned by the Church at the University of Paris in 1310, hidden in a manuscript at the Bibliothèque municipale in Valenciennes. The fragment corresponds with roughly two chapters in the only extant French version of the manuscript (Chantilly, Musée Condé MS F XIV 26), and when compared with other editions of the Mirouer, it appears to be composed in what might have been Marguerite Porete's native dialect. The discovery changed scholars' perceptions of the weight of the various versions and translations - the Chantilly manuscript had been used previously to settle any questions of discrepancy, but now it appears that the Continental Latin and Middle English translations should be the arbiters. This discovery has elevated the Middle English editions, and has made the question of the translator's identity - he is known only by his initials M.N. - and background more imperative to an understanding of why a work with such a dubious history would be translated and harbored by English Carthusians in the century that followed its condemnation. The only candidate suggested for translator of the Mirouer has been Michael Northburgh (d. 1361), the Bishop of London and co-founder of the London Charterhouse, where two of the three remaining copies of the translation were once owned, but the language of the text and Northburgh's own position and interests do not fit this suggestion. My argument is that the content of the book, the method of its translation, its selection as a work for a Latin-illiterate audience, all fit within the interests of a circle of writers based in Yorkshire at the end of the fourteenth century. By beginning among the Yorkshire circle, and widening the search to include writers with a non-traditional contemplative audience, one that exists outside of the cloister - writers like Walter Hilton, the anonymous authors of the Cloud of Unknowing and the Chastising of God's Children, and Nicholas Love - we may have a better chance of locating and understanding the motives of the Middle English translator of the Mirouer. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. English 2011

This thesis examines three manuscripts which demonstrate negative attitudes towards the Latin translation of the fourteenth-century Old French mystical work The Mirror of Simple Souls, written by Marguerite Porete. Marguerite was burned at the stake for heresy in Paris in 1310, and her Mirror was also condemned and meant to be destroyed. The Mirror survived inquisitorial efforts to exterminate it, was translated into Italian, Middle English, and Latin, and became accepted and valued by many religious circles in the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Examination of the Latin manuscripts, however, demonstrates that there was also a continuing trend of opposition towards and condemnation of the Mirror, even after its original Parisian condemnation was forgotten. This level of opposition is not seen in the Mirror's other vernacular circulations, making the Latin tradition unique in the amount of censure it received. This demonstrates a multi-faceted tradition in the Mirror's circulation, showing that the Mirror, rather than entering definitively into either the realm of orthodoxy or heresy, instead had a place in both, occupying a grey area between the two. This thesis provides new and detailed information on manuscripts which have never been studied in their own right by Mirror scholars, and examines these codices' implications both for the circulation of the Latin tradition and for the history of the Mirror's post-condemnation circulation as a whole.