20 Books of Summer, #4: The Mirror of Simple Souls

The beguines of medieval Europe were lay religious orders of women who lived in community but did not take monastic vows. As the translator, Susan Emanuel, explains in her afterword to Aline Kiner’s The Mirror of Simple Souls, becoming a beguine allowed women to follow a different path outside ‘the binary choice between marriage and the cloister’. This liminal space attracted fear and suspicion from authorities. In the late thirteenth century, the Parisian satirist Rutebeuf ridiculed these women for what he saw as the inherent contradictions in their lives:

If the Beguine marries,

That is her conversion:

Since her vows, her profession

Are not for life.

Now she weeps and then she prays,

And then she will take a husband:

Now she is Martha, now she is Mary;

Now she is chaste, now she marries.

But do not speak ill of her.

The king will not tolerate it.

As this suggests, the beguines of early fourteenth-century Paris, on which this novel focuses, had enjoyed royal protection for their way of life and their beguinage, the walled haven in which most of the women lived. At the time Rutebeuf was writing, King Louis IX was a staunch supporter of mendicant orders like the Franciscans, who were responsible for the spiritual guidance of the beguines. But when this novel opens, Louis is long dead and there are ongoing tensions between the current king, Philip the Fair, and the pope. Hundreds of warrior monks, the Templars, have been arrested after malicious rumours about their practices and the beguine Marguerite Porete has been accused of heresy for her work of religious mysticism, The Mirror of Simple Souls. This novel starts with Marguerite burning at the stake, the only medieval author to be executed for a book.

L: The last existing beguinage, in Antwerp; R: an image of beguines

The Mirror of Simple Souls was originally published in French as La nuit des béguines [The Night of the Beguines], recognising the doom approaching this Parisian order in a time of turmoil. Although beguines continued to practice in the Low Countries, the Parisian beguinage was closed in 1317, just after this novel finishes, after a set of decrees published by Pope John XXII condemned and banned them. The canon Jean de Saint-Victor wrote at the time, ‘The beguines no longer sing, the beguines no longer read’. This sense of menace is visible from early on in The Mirror of Simple Souls, as an older beguine, Ysabel, reflects that something is up with the weather: ‘The winters have become steadily harsher. In 1303, a frost scorched the earth… In 1308, on the first Saturday after Ascension, a snowstorm made more destructive by huge hailstones devastated the region around Paris… And on 30th October 1309, a wind blew for an hour that was so strong it made the stone arches of Saint-Denis cathedral tremble’.

Kiner is brilliant at conveying these complex histories throughout her novel. The Mirror of Simple Souls is the opposite of much bad histfic which seizes upon an exciting setting and then just uses it to play out modern cliches. This book is steeped in the story of the Parisian beguines, and it’s fascinating. I love novels about nuns but I had no idea that so many medieval European women lived in this different kind of religious space. Kiner also writes well about her two principal settings: the beguinage itself and a silk workshop where some of the beguines work. If there’s a medieval setting I truly adore other than a nunnery, it’s a craft workshop, so this was right up my street.

Having said that, I didn’t love The Mirror of Simple Souls as much as I wanted to, despite its great strengths. The central cast of beguines are serviceable enough characters but never quite sparked into life for me. They fulfil slightly stock roles in this kind of book: the older herbalist, the intelligent woman who dabbles in forbidden texts, the rebellious redhead who wants to flee the institution, the one who has her nose in everybody’s business. The plot reminded me of Sarah Dunant’s Sacred Hearts but without the same kind of emotional depth. The Mirror of Simple Souls is absolutely worth reading, but it’s inspired me to seek out more non-fiction about the beguines (the go-to seems to be Tanya Stabler Miller’s work) rather than to really take this book to my heart.

I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review. It will be published in the UK by indie Pushkin Press TOMORROW, Tuesday 25th June.

I will be back later this week with a review of another of my 20 Books that focuses on themes of sisterhood, freaky weather, and a world that’s slowly coming to an end…