Leído. Annihilation and Autorship Three Women Mystics of The 1290s (Barbara Newman)

Annihilation and Authorship:
Three Women Mystics of the 1290s

By Barbara Newman
One of the most startling tenets of late-medieval mysticism is its call for self-
annihilation. The human soul, with all its powers of knowing, willing, and loving,
must be reduced to nothing and merge into God without remainder, sacrificing its
unique identity in indistinct union with the Beloved. On the face of it, the quest
for annihilation—a Christian version of nirvana—seems to represent the epitome
of disillusionment with the present life. Nothing in this world is worth saving,
for salvation merely reverses the gratuitous act of creation. As one fourteenth-
century mystic put it, the naked soul must return to the naked Godhead, “where I
was before I was created.”1 Yet mystical annihilation proves to be a complex idea,
with significant variants across the range of late-medieval spirituality. Although
the concept became widespread only in the calamitous fourteenth century, it first
emerged in the relatively calm 1290s. More remarkably, it emerged simulta
neously in the writings of three women who lived far apart and could not possibly
have known of each other. Three great works of women’s mysticism came into
being in this decade and all profess the new doctrine, though in different ways
and to differing degrees.
Mechthild of Hackeborn, Angela of Foligno, and Marguerite Porete were exact
contemporaries who differed in language, social status, and modes of religious
life; their books diverge no less in genre, modes of production, and posthumous
destinies. Thus comparing them can provide a way to contextualize the radical
idea of annihilatio, which Bernard McGinn links expressly with women, as it
took shape within the varied contexts of their authorship.2 Yet a soul’s desire for
annihilation is on some level deeply opposed to a desire for authorship, which can
preserve the trace of an individual self for all time. So this article asks two inter-
related questions. First, what are the roots of mystical annihilation? Where does
this new concept come from, and how does it coalesce in the writings of these
very different women? Second, how do they negotiate the conflict, already voiced
by Saint Paul, between a pastoral desire to teach and a mystical “desire to be
I thank Justine Trombley for allowing me to cite her forthcoming article. Sean Field, Richard Kieck-
hefer, Robert Lerner, and Bernard McGinn all made helpful comments on earlier drafts. Any errors
that managed to survive their review are entirely my own.
This presidential address was delivered on 27 February 2016 at the annual meeting of the Medieval
Academy of America in Boston.
1
“Sister Catherine” (Schwester Katrei), anonymous beguine dialogue, trans. Elvira Borgstädt in
Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, ed. Bernard McGinn (New York, 1986), 361.
2
Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200–
1350) (New York, 1998), 157, 199. See also Juan Marin, “Annihilation and Deification in Beguine
Theology and Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls,” Harvard Theological Review 103 (2010):
89–109.
Speculum 91/3 (July 2016). Copyright 2016 by the Medieval Academy of America.
DOI: 10.1086/686939, 0038-7134/2016/9103-0001$10.00.
592 Annihilation and Authorship
dissolved and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Phil. 1.23)? I focus especially
on the scene of writing, which is dramatized in these and other women’s texts
because it was so difficult and risky.3 All three express conflict about their literary
projects, but they do so in distinctly individual modes, allowing us to ask how the
ways they understood annihilation relate to the ways they understood writing.
Mechthild of Hackeborn: Annihilation, Ecstasy, and Celestial Bliss
Mechthild of Hackeborn (1241–98) enjoyed as traditional and privileged a

religious life as any woman could hope for. Her father, the powerful baron of
Hackeborn, was related to the Hohenstaufen; he held lands in northern Thuringia
and the Harz mountains.4 Mechthild’s older sister Gertrud (not to be confused
with her friend, Gertrud “the Great”) was elected abbess of the recently founded
nunnery of Rodarsdorf in 1250. Only nineteen at the time, she soon moved the
community to Helfta near Eisleben, close to her family seat.5 During Gertrud’s il-
lustrious forty-year reign, the monastery became revered throughout Saxony as a
center of learning and holiness. The abbess was renowned for maintaining a first-
class scriptorium, enhancing the library with the purchase and copying of books,
promoting education, and encouraging frequent Communion and Eucharistic pi-
ety.6 Mechthild, who had entered in 1248 at the age of seven, became chantress,
teacher, novice mistress, and effectual second-in-command.7
The question of these nuns’ religious order has been much discussed. Though
identified in several documents as Benedictine, Helfta followed a Cistercian cus-
tomary, for its founding sisters in 1229 had come from a Cistercian community
near Halberstadt. Only a year earlier, however, the Cistercian General Chap-
ter had firmly rejected the incorporation of any more nunneries, so that status
could never become official. Most of the nuns’ confessors were Dominicans (the
only order mentioned in Mechthild’s Liber specialis gratiae), but the sisters also
3
Among the more influential works on this much-studied topic are Peter Dronke, Women Writers
of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua († 203) to Marguerite Porete († 1310)
(Cambridge, UK, 1984); Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and
Mysticism (Oxford, 1995); Catherine M. Mooney, ed., Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their
Interpreters (Philadelphia, 1999); Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace, eds., The Cambridge Com-
panion to Medieval Women’s Writing (Cambridge, UK, 2003); John W. Coakley, Women, Men, and
Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (New York, 2006); and Alastair Min-
nis and Rosalynn Voaden, eds., Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition c. 1100–c. 1500
(Turnhout, 2010).
4
Margot Schmidt, “Mechthild von Hackeborn,” in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfas-
serlexikon, vol. 6 (Berlin, 1987), cols. 251–60.
5
Michael Bangert, “Die sozio-kulturelle Situation des Klosters St. Maria in Helfta,” in “Vor dir
steht die leere Schale meiner Sehnsucht”: Die Mystik der Frauen von Helfta, ed. Michael Bangert and
Hildegund Keul (Leipzig, 1998), 29-47, at 41.
6
Mechthild of Hackeborn and the nuns of Helfta, Liber specialis gratiae 6.1, in Revelationes Ger-
trudianae ac Mechtildianae, vol. 2, ed. Louis Paquelin and the monks of Solesmes (Poitiers and Paris,
1877), 374–75.
7
“Velut princeps militiae cum sorore sua, venerabili Domna Abbatissa, omnia monasterii tam
interiora quam exteriora sapientissime et ordinatissime gubernabat”: Liber specialis gratiae 5.30,
pp. 367–68.
Speculum 91/3 (July 2016)

Mechthild of Hackeborn Angela of Foligno Marguerite Porete
Dates 1241–19 Nov. 1298 d. 4 Jan. 1309 d. 1 June 1310
Region Saxony Umbria Hainaut
Vernacular Low German Italian (Umbrian) French (Picard)
Religious status Benedictine/Cistercian nun, virgin, wife, mother, tertiary, penitent beguine
chantress
Confessor Dominican Franciscan unknown
Social status noble wealthy bourgeois unknown
Ecclesiastical fate beata, minor cult beatified 1701, canonized 2013 burned as a heretic
Book
Title Liber specialis gratiae Libro: Memorial and Instructions Mirouer des simples ames anienties
Dates 1291–99 Mem. 1292–97, revised 1299–1300; 1290s–1300s, perhaps revised
Instr. c. 1296–1310 after 1306
Written by Gertrud of Helfta and another nun Brother A., confessor (Mem.), and self
various disciples (Instr.)
Language Latin Latin French
Extant MSS c. 300 incl. anthologies 28–31 c. 17 incl. fragments
Early translations Dutch, German, English, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, French, German Latin, English, Italian
(in chron. order) Italian, French
Genre visionary recital, liturgical commen- spiritual autobiography and guidance allegorical dialogue
tary, hagiography
maintained close ties with male Benedictines, Franciscans, and Teutonic Knights.8
In fact, Helfta was one of the last great Stifte—wealthy, aristocratic, proudly
independent female houses whose tradition dates back to the Carolingian era.
The nuns, always called dominae, were recruited from the founding families
(the counts of Mansfeld and the barons of Hackeborn), the lower nobility, and
ministeriales. Their manual labor extended to traditionally upper-class female
tasks like spinning, embroidery, and copying and illuminating manuscripts. In
the 1290s, while Mechthild’s book was being written, there were probably about
sixty choir nuns and perhaps fifty conversi and conversae.9
Within this privileged enclave, Mechthild was a lively, energetic, cheerful pres-
ence. As chantress, she had a fine voice and sang with unusual fervor, though she
had to resist a habit of slipping into ecstasy in the middle of an antiphon.10 As
a teacher she was much admired; the sisters gathered to hear her expound the
scriptures “as if she were a preacher.”11 Like other holy people, she attracted
disciples who sought what we now call spiritual direction. According to her vita,
“people would confidently disclose the secrets of their hearts to her, and she freed
a great many from their burdens—not only within the monastery, but also out-
side. Both religious and laypeople came to her from far away, saying they had
never found so much consolation from anyone else. She composed and taught so
many prayers that, if they were all written down, they would make a book longer
than the Psalter.”12 Mechthild enjoyed a close friendship with her protégée, the
younger Gertrud, who shared her mystical as well as her literary gifts.13 But she
seems to have been a favorite with all: “Everyone loved her deeply and every sis-
ter wanted to be her friend, even to the point of causing her many difficulties.”14
Despite her learning and charismatic gifts, Mechthild received no divine call to
share her revelations—an omission that sets her apart from many female mystics.
So no book would likely have materialized had it not been for two events. The
first was the landing of a meteor at Helfta around 1270—a meteor named Mech-
thild of Magdeburg, whose fire was dimming but far from quenched. Celebrated
for visions and prophecies, the aging beguine had been harassed by hostile clergy
8
Bangert, “Die sozio-kulturelle Situation,” 34–35.
9
Ibid., 38–39. Caroline Walker Bynum estimates a higher figure of “more than a hundred”:
“Women Mystics in the Thirteenth Century: The Case of the Nuns of Helfta,” in Jesus as Mother:
Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1982), 175.
10
Liber specialis gratiae 1.0, 2.4, 3.7, and 5.30; pp. 6, 140–41, 205–6, 366.
11
“Ubique enim Sorores se circa eam velut praedicatorem, auditurae verbum Dei congregabant”:
Liber specialis gratiae 5.30, p. 365.
12
“Omnium refugium et consolatrix erat, et singulari dono hanc gratiam habebat, ut homines
secreta cordis sui ei fiducialiter aperirent, et quam plures a suis gravaminibus se per eam ereptos, non
solum intra claustrum, sed etiam exteri, et de longe venientes religiosi et saeculares; nec ab homine
unquam tantum consolationis sicut ab ista se invenisse dicebant. Tot orationes dictavit et docuit, quod
si insimul scriberentur, psalterii excederent quantitatem”: ibid.
13
Barbara Newman, “Iam cor meum non sit suum: Exchanging Hearts, from Heloise to Helfta,” in
From Knowledge to Beatitude: St. Victor, Twelfth-Century Scholars, and Beyond. Essays in Honor of
Grover A. Zinn, Jr., ed. E. Ann Matter and Lesley Smith (Notre Dame, 2013), 281–99.
14
“Ab omnibus nimium amabatur, eique sociari quaelibet affectabat, ut etiam ex hoc multa impedi-
menta videretur habere”: Liber specialis gratiae 1.0, p. 6.

Annihilation and Authorship 595
and now faced encroaching blindness. As she could no longer live alone, Abbess
Gertrud generously invited her to join the community at Helfta. It could not have
been easy for the fiercely independent, now disabled beguine to adapt to convent
life, yet she did so with grace. Mechthild brought her book with her—The Flow-
ing Light of the Godhead, in Low German—and bravely continued to write, even
though she had to dictate its seventh and final book to her new sisters. “Lord, I
thank you for taking from me my eyesight,” she prayed, “and for now serving
me with the eyes of others.”15 We do not know which nuns took the old beguine’s
dictation, but Mechthild of Hackeborn could well have been among them. A
chantress was normally in charge of the scriptorium, where liturgical books were
copied, and Mechthild possessed a high degree of literacy. She would have been
in her early thirties at the time. Her older namesake clearly made a deep impres-
sion, for the Liber specialis gratiae contains many allusions to Mechthild of Mag-
deburg’s book, as well as a moving account of her death around 1282.16 More
broadly, the excitement of sharing in the older Mechthild’s authorship must have
galvanized the community. If a solitary beguine could persevere so courageously
in the task of writing, then why not the women of Helfta, with all their resources
plus the gift of Latinity? Were they any less graced by God?
The second, immediate stimulus for production of the Liber was a sad one.
In 1291, Mechthild of Hackeborn fell sick with a painful illness, leaving her
intermittently bedridden for long periods and causing her eventual death at fifty-
seven. The formerly active nun chafed under the restraint of forced immobility.
Not only did she feel useless to the community, but during the first phase of this
illness her beloved sister, Abbess Gertrud, died. Deprived at once of the leader-
ship of both sisters, who had dominated Helfta for four decades, the nuns were
devastated. But the new abbess, Sophia of Querfurt-Mansfeld, had a brilliant
idea. Mechthild had revealed little to date of her inner life, but on her sickbed
she began to share some of her copious visions, especially with her prize student
Gertrud. Abbess Sophia therefore asked Gertrud and another confidante of the
ailing nun to write down her revelations.17 They did so in secret, presumably
conversing with her in German, then jotting down notes, which they formalized
in Latin.18 The whole process of transcription, translation, revision, and editing
took at least eight years—as well it might, given that the Liber fills 421 pages in
its nineteenth-century print edition. Only near the end of this process did Mech-
thild learn what her friends had been doing. At first she felt angry and betrayed,
15
Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead 7.64, trans. Frank Tobin (New
York, 1998), 334.
16
Liber specialis gratiae 5.3 and 5.6, pp. 320–21, 325–28.
17
“Benedictus sit Dominus Deus omnis gratiae, cujus dono et voluntate hic Liber editus est;
nequaquam propria deliberatione et praesumptione scribentium, sed consilio et praecepto Domnae
Abbatissae suae et consensu Praelati sui”: Liber specialis gratiae 5.31, p. 369. The unnamed prelate,
perhaps the nuns’ provost or the bishop of Halberstadt, is not mentioned again.
18
Schmidt hypothesizes a lost German original in “Mechthild of Hackeborn,” 256. I think it more
likely that, while the nuns may have taken notes in German, they planned from the start to write the
book in Latin.

but with the help of several more revelations and a direct command from Christ,
she reconciled herself to authorship.19
This at any rate is the story the Liber tells about itself. Before examining it
in detail, we should ask how plausible it is in its broad outlines. It is certainly
no topos, for though God eventually puts his imprimatur on the book, it is not
he who sets its writing in motion. Unlike Hildegard of Bingen and Elisabeth of
Schönau, her Latinate predecessors, Mechthild feels no call to preach or write. In
fact, she is deeply opposed to the idea—hence the need for secrecy, which again is
not typical. Other women who dictated books were keenly aware that they were
doing so, sometimes (as in Angela’s case) expressing dissatisfaction with their
scribes and seeking more control. Finally, such women virtually always worked
with male confessors as amanuenses.20 The only other cases of nuns transcribing
their sisters’ revelations took place at Helfta itself: the last book of Mechthild of
Magdeburg’s Flowing Light and Gertrud the Great’s Legatus divinae pietatis.21
The latter was completed soon after the Liber specialis gratiae in a similar way,
though probably without the secrecy.22 Disseminated in abridged form by the
Dominicans, the Liber was surely an inspiration for the fourteenth-century genre
of sisterbooks, or communal vitae sororum highlighting visions and other mysti-
cal experiences.23 So its account of its own composition cannot be dismissed as
typical hagiographic fare. Although the book does not mention Abbess Sophia
by name, the commission to write it testifies to her pastoral wisdom. Finding an
19
On the writing process see Claudia Kolletzki, “‘Über die Wahrheit dieses Buches’: Die Entstehung
des ‘Liber specialis gratiae’ Mechthilds von Hackeborn zwischen Wirklichkeit und Fiktion,” in
Bangert and Keul, Vor dir steht die leere Schale meiner Sehnsucht, 156–79; Margarete Hubrath, “The
Liber specialis gratiae as a Collective Work of Several Nuns,” Jahrbuch der Oswald von Wolkenstein
Gesellschaft 11 (1999): 233–44; and Anna Harrison, “‘Oh! What Treasure Is in This Book?’: Writing,
Reading, and Community at the Monastery of Helfta,” Viator 39/1 (2008): 75–106.
20
For case studies see Mooney, Gendered Voices, and Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power.
21
For a similar case, we must turn to the much later Florentine Carmelite, Saint Maria Mad-
dalena de’ Pazzi (1566–1607), whose sisters eavesdropped on her ecstasies and transcribed them:
Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, Selected Revelations, trans. Armando Maggi (New York, 2000). Two
female-authored vernacular vitae from Provence also include vision narratives: Felipa de Porcelet,
The “Life” of Saint Douceline, Beguine of Provence [1297], trans. Kathleen Garay and Madeleine
Jeay (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK, 2001); and Marguerite d’Oingt, The Life of the Virgin Saint Béatrice
of Ornacieux [d. 1303], trans. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, in The Writings of Margaret of Oingt,
Medieval Prioress and Mystic (Newburyport, MA, 1990), 47–62. Both are contemporary with the
Helfta literature.
22
Unlike the Liber, the Legatus has a very poor manuscript tradition. Until recently, only two com-
plete and three fragmentary manuscripts were known, the earliest dating from 1412. Gertrud’s fame
began only with the dissemination of print editions in the sixteenth century. In contrast to Mechthild,
she became popular especially in Spain and France. Pope Benedict XIV (r. 1740–58) gave her the title
“the Great,” partly to distinguish her from Abbess Gertrud of Hackeborn: Sr. Maximilian Marnau,
introduction to Gertrude of Helfta, The Herald of Divine Love, trans. Margaret Winkworth (New
York, 1993), 42–43; Balázs J. Nemes, “Text Production and Authorship: Gertrude of Helfta’s Lega-
tus divinae pietatis,” in A Companion to Mysticism and Devotion in Northern Germany in the Late
Middle Ages, ed. Elizabeth Andersen, Henrike Lähnemann, and Anne Simon (Leiden, 2014), 103–30.
23
On these books see Gertrud Jaron Lewis, By Women, for Women, about Women: The Sister-
Books of Fourteenth-Century Germany (Toronto, 1996); and Rebecca L. R. Garber, Feminine Figu-
rae: Representations of Gender in Religious Texts by Medieval German Women Writers, 1100–1375
(New York, 2003).

eager audience for her revelations surely lifted the suffering Mechthild’s spirits.
Further, the nuns bereft of their longtime abbess could have found a new sense
of purpose in this communal writing project, reviving the thrill the older sisters
must have felt when they assisted Mechthild of Magdeburg with her book two
decades earlier.
It is perhaps surprising that they chose Latin as their medium. The beguine
had composed her Flowing Light in the vernacular, and the nuns transcribed its
last book in the same tongue. When Mechthild of Hackeborn conversed with her
friends, they almost certainly spoke German. It is hard to imagine even highly
Latinate nuns using the learned tongue for everyday speech. But, as they well
knew, Latin held greater authority. The first book of the Liber, constituting al-
most a third of the whole seven-part work, is a liturgical commentary in visionary
form: the chantress recalls revelations she received while performing such-and-
such an antiphon or psalm verse on a given feast throughout the liturgical year.
For evocations of the Office, Latin was indispensable. The later books too are
suffused with citations of scripture and liturgy. Both the Liber and its companion
volume, the Legatus, testify to a level of Latinity that nuns elsewhere in Europe
at this time would have been hard pressed to match. The choice of Latin enabled
immediate, transregional diffusion, as well as the production of multiple trans-
lations—first Dutch and German, then English and Swedish, finally Italian and
French. Where mystical texts were concerned, Latin was still the platform of
choice for translations.24
Seven chapters scattered through the Liber describe its composition and vouch
for its authority. Among the most interesting is a dream vouchsafed to an un-
named scribe:
The person who wrote this book, taking it partly from [Mechthild’s] own mouth and
partly from that of her closest friend [Gertrud], saw this vision in a dream almost three
years earlier. It seemed to her that this worthy handmaid of God, about whom we
speak, was devoutly receiving Communion. When she returned to her place after Holy
Communion, she was holding a large golden vial more than a cubit long, and she began
to chant in a loud voice, saying, “Lord, you have delivered to me five talents. See, I
have made five talents more” [Matt. 25.20]. After this she asked everyone, “Who wants
honey from the celestial Jerusalem?” Then all the sisters who were in choir approached
her, and she offered each one some honey from the vial. The one who saw this vision
also approached, and she gave her a morsel of bread infused with that honey. As she
held it in her hands, the morsel with the honey began to increase marvelously in size un-
til it grew into a whole loaf, soft and warm. And the honey, suffusing the bread through
and through, trickled through the hands of the one who held it as abundantly as oil. It
sprinkled her bosom like dew and flowed all the way to the ground.25
24
Barbara Newman, “Latin and the Vernaculars,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian
Mysticism, ed. Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman (Cambridge, UK, 2012), 225–39.
25
“Nam illa persona quae hunc librum partim ex ore ipsius, partim ex ore sibi familiarissimae
conscripsit, ante tres annos fere talem per somnum vidit visionem. Videbatur enim sibi quod haec
Deo digna persona de qua sermo est devotissime communicaret. Cumque a Communione sancta
rediret, habebat phialam auream maximam, longiorem cubito; et alta voce coepit decantare dicens:
“Domine, quinque talenta tradidisti mihi, ecce alia quinque superlucratus sum”; post haec dixit om-
nibus: “Quis vult de melle coelestis Jerusalem?” Tum Sororibus omnibus quae in choro erant ad eam

Here the chantress appears in the role of a priest, distributing Communion in
bread and honey.26 The morsel that grows into a full, delicious loaf is a metaphor
for her book, while the honey represents the sweetness of God’s grace flowing
“as abundantly as oil” over those who handle it. In retrospect, the scribe’s dream
almost three years before writing the book becomes its prophetic authorization.
Other visions come to Mechthild herself. In fact, she claims first to learn about
the secret book when a divine voice asks her at Mass, “What reward do you think
[Gertrud] will receive for what she is writing?”27 Astonished, Mechthild asks her
friend if she is in fact transcribing her confidences, but Gertrud is afraid to admit
it, so many reassurances must follow. Christ appears with the book in his right
hand and kisses it, saying, “Everything that is written in this book flowed out of
my divine heart and will flow back into it.”28 Later Mechthild asks Jesus why she
still feels distressed, though she knows the book is written by his will; he says her
dismay stems from ingratitude. Yet again he assures her that he governs every
phase of the project:
I am in the hearts of those who desire to listen to you, stirring up that desire in them.
I am the understanding in the ears of those who hear you; it is through me that they
understand what they hear. I am also in the mouths of those who speak of these things.
And I am in the hands of the writers as their helper and collaborator in every way. So all
that they compose and write in me and through me is true, for I am Truth itself. . . . Even
if they do not record these things as elegantly as I gave them to you, yet, by the help and
cooperation of my grace, their work is approved and confirmed in my truth.29
accendentibus, singulis de phiala illa favum mellis propinabat. Illa autem persona quae haec in visu
conspexit etiam accessit, et illa dedit ei buccellam panis de illo melle infusam; quam dum illa manibus
teneret, miro modo buccella illa simul cum melle excrescere coepit, ita ut bucella in panem integrum,
mollem et calidum excresceret, et favus ille panem tam intus quam foris penetrans, etiam per manus se
tenentis in similitudine olei, in tanta ubertate distillabat, ut sinum ejus et deinde ipsam terram influens
irroraret”: Liber specialis gratiae 5.24, pp. 356–57.
26
In the early church it was customary to give the newly baptized a drink of milk and honey, sym-
bolizing infancy and the Promised Land, after they emerged from the font. In Hippolytus’s Apostolic
Tradition, written c. 215, the bishop is said to bless the bread, then the wine, then a cup of milk and
honey. The custom is also mentioned by Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria: Owen F. Cummings,
Eucharistic Doctors: A Theological History (New York, 2005), 32–34. In the Liber, divine grace is
often said to be “honey-sweet” or “honey-flowing” (mellifluus).
27
“Cum hic liber scriberetur, ignorante penitus illa beata de qua dicimus persona, die quadam audi-
vit in Missa vocem nominantem illam personam cui secreta sua revelare consueverat, ac dicentem:
‘Quid putas meriti accipiet illa pro eo quod scribit?’”: Liber specialis gratiae 2.42, p. 190.
28
“Omnia quae in hoc libro continentur scripta, a Corde meo divino profluxerunt, et refluent in
ipsum”: Liber specialis gratiae 2.43, p. 193. Cf. Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the
Godhead 4.2, trans. Tobin, 144: “He commanded me, a frail woman, to write this book out of God’s
heart and mouth. And so this book has come lovingly from God and does not have its origins in hu-
man thought.”
29
“Ego sum in corde desiderantium audire a te, excitando ad hoc desiderium earum. Ego sum intel-
lectus in aure audientium, per quem intelligunt quod audiunt. Ego etiam sum in ore inde loquentium;
ego sum in manu scribentium; in omnibus cooperator eorum et adjutor; sicque omne quod in me et
per me veritatem dictant et scribunt, est verum. . . . etsi non tam eleganter prout tibi donavi depro-
munt, mea tamen cooperante et adjuvante gratia, in mea veritate approbatum confirmatur”: Liber
specialis gratiae 5.22, pp. 354–55.

The proliferation of such anecdotes shows how Mechthild struggled to reconcile
herself to authorship. Her humility, of course, heightens her saintly aura. But she
seems truly to accept the book only when she is persuaded of its benefit to oth-
ers. In fact, Christ tells her that “those who love the gift of God in other people”
will have the same reward as those who first received it. His analogy is telling:
if a bride is wearing a lovely necklace and other brides make themselves copies,
each will have the same beauty.30 In the last of several thanksgivings for the book,
Gertrud sees the deceased Mechthild in glory and asks her how she now feels
about it. She responds, “It is my greatest joy.” Therefore, the scribe concludes, “if
anyone loves this gift, it belongs to that person just as truly as it does to her who
received it from God. When someone receives a royal gift through a messenger,
he possesses it just as truly and gets as much value from it as someone else who
receives it directly from the king’s hand.”31
Like the priest distributing Communion, the royal messenger bearing gifts, or
the first bride to wear the necklace, Mechthild is prima inter pares. By resigning
herself to a written text, she offers her readers both edification and heavenly re-
wards, for everyone who reads the book gratefully will be as blessed as she and
her scribes. In any case, her authorship is only virtual. Although she is the one
through whom the Liber enters the world, its words are substantively God’s and
literally her sisters’. In fact, Mechthild nearly achieved the anonymity she craved.
Only a single manuscript, copied from a lost exemplar at Helfta, gives her name;
others use at most the initial M. Even the hagiographic parts of the Liber (extant
in the same manuscript) refer to her not by name but as “this virgin” or “this
humble handmaid.”32 Such an attenuated, communal version of authorship is
indeed compatible with a doctrine of mystical annihilation.
References to annihilating union appear three times in the Liber, twice with
the verb annihilare and once without it. In medieval Latin generally, annihilare
is a synonym for “destroy”; its specialized mystical sense, the merger or disap-
pearance of a soul in God, is rare before the 1290s.33 The three works examined
30
Liber specialis gratiae 5.23, p. 356.
31
“Quisquis ergo hoc donum diligit, ejus tam veraciter est, sicut illius qui hoc a Deo accepit. Sicut
qui donum regis per nuntium suscipit, tam proprie possidet et tantam inde consequitur utilitatem,
sicut ille qui hoc a manu regis accipit”: Liber specialis gratiae 7.17, p. 413.
32
This manuscript is Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August-Bibliothek, cod. 1003 Helmst., the only exem-
plar to contain all seven books of the Liber. It was copied in 1370 by a priest named Albert, vicar of
St. Paul in Erfurt, who says he carefully checked it against an original from Helfta. It is one of very
few manuscripts to retain the original title, Liber specialis gratiae; most others (including translations)
have the corrupt form Liber spiritualis gratiae, based on a faulty expansion of the abbreviation sp’alis:
Ernst Hellgardt, “Latin and the Vernacular: Mechthild of Magdeburg—Mechthild of Hackeborn—
Gertrude of Helfta,” in Andersen, Lähnemann, and Simon, A Companion to Mysticism and Devo-
tion, 137–41; Rosalynn Voaden, “Mechtild of Hackeborn,” in Minnis and Voaden, Medieval Holy
Women in the Christian Tradition, 431–51.
33
Du Cange’s Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis (Niort, 1883–87) does not cite the mystical
sense of annichilare at all, but lists the meanings “to reduce to nothing, abolish, destroy”: online at
ducange.enc.sorbonne.fr/annichilare. According to the Brepolis database, which includes the Monu-
menta Germaniae Historica and the Library of Latin Texts, the mystical sense occurs only in Ramon
Llull (c. 1232–c. 1315) and a sixteenth-century translation of Ruusbroec, apart from the authors cited
in this article. In the Patrologia Latina, mystical annihilatio is used in an anonymous Meditatio in

here—Mechthild’s Liber, Angela’s Libro, and Marguerite’s Mirouer—are among
the first to employ it. Mechthild’s book uses the term, as we might expect, in the
context of mystical union: “Then Love spoke again to the Soul: ‘Enter into the joy
of your Lord’ [Matt. 25.21]. With these words the Soul was totally rapt into God.
Just as a drop of water infused into wine is changed wholly into wine, so this
blessed soul passed into God and became one spirit with him [1 Cor. 6.17]. In this
union the Soul was annihilated in herself.”34 Reinforcing Saint Bernard’s famous
metaphor of water infused in wine, annihilatio describes an ecstatic union in
which the soul loses all self-awareness, remaining conscious only of God. As Rob-
ert Lerner showed long ago, the image from Bernard’s De diligendo Deo enjoyed
high favor with thirteenth- and fourteenth-century mystics, despite occasional
suspicions of heresy, until Jean Gerson’s disapproval in the fifteenth century fi-
nally quashed it.35 The simile is one of several that Bernard used to convey the
state of the blessed in heaven:36 “Just as a small drop of water infused into much
wine seems to lose itself completely, taking on the taste and color of wine, . . . so
it will be necessary then for all human affection in the saints to melt away from
itself in some ineffable way, being poured wholly into the will of God. Otherwise
how will God be all in all if anything human remains in man? The substance will
indeed remain, but in another form, another glory, and another power.”37
Both the simile of mixed liquids and the mystical sense of annihilatio have
roots in Eucharistic theology. Bernard was undoubtedly thinking of the moment
at Mass when the priest adds a little water to the chalice before consecration.
“Grant us,” he prays, “by the mystery of this water and wine to share in the di-
orationem Dominicam to describe the holiness a priest should possess to consecrate the sacrament:
“Quis adeo dignus est, quis adeo humilis est ad susceptionem hujus sacramenti ad offerendum Filium
Deo Patri, ut ille qui, sicut supradictum est, se totaliter in Deum ordinavit quantum ad intellectum,
affectum, et effectum, qui se totum Deo obtulit, totum se sacrificio concremavit, qui in se annihilatus
est, et totus in Deum illatus est, qui jam non quae sua sunt quaerit, sed quae Jesu Christi [Phil. 2.4]?”
(PL 149:573b). Ascribed to Bonaventure in some manuscripts, this treatise was probably composed
in the fourteenth century; it was later inserted into the Stimulus amoris of James of Milan: Baldui-
nus Distelbrink, Bonaventurae scripta authentica, dubia vel spuria critice recensita (Rome, 1975),
141–42, 194–95.
34
“Dixitque iterum amor ad animam: ‘Intra in gaudium Domini tui.’ In hoc verbo totaliter in Deum
rapta est, ut sicut aquae stilla infusa vino, tota mutatur in vinum, ita haec beata in Deum transiens,
unus cum eo spiritus est effecta. In hac unione anima in se annihilabatur”: Liber specialis gratiae
2.17, p. 152.
35
Robert E. Lerner, “The Image of Mixed Liquids in Late Medieval Mystical Thought,” Church
History 40 (1971): 397–411.
36
Jean Pépin, “‘Stilla aquae modica multo infusa vino, ferrum ignitum, luce perfusus aer’: L’origine
de trois comparaisons familières à la théologie mystique médiévale,” in Miscellanea André Combes,
ed. Antonio Piolanti, 3 vols. (Rome and Paris, 1967-68), 1:331–75. All three comparisons—water
transformed into wine, molten iron turning to fire, and luminous air becoming sunlight—originate in
Greek patristic sources, transmitted by Maximus the Confessor and John Scotus Eriugena.
37
“Quomodo stilla aquae modica, multo infusa vino, deficere a se tota videtur, dum et saporem
vini induit et colorem . . . sic omnem tunc in sanctis humanam affectionem quodam ineffabili modo
necesse erit a semetipsa liquescere, atque in Dei penitus transfundi voluntatem. Alioquin quomodo
omnia in omnibus erit Deus, si in homine de homine quidquam supererit? Manebit quidem substan-
tia, sed in alia forma, alia gloria aliaque potentia”: Bernard of Clairvaux, De diligendo Deo 28, in
Opera omnia, ed. Jean Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, and Henri Rochais, vol. 3 (Rome, 1963), 143.

vinity of [Christ], who humbled himself to share in our humanity.” The prayer 38
allegorizes the ancient custom of diluting strong wine with water, interpreting the
latter as human nature—Christ’s and our own, now mingled inseparably with
the wine of his divinity. In Bernard’s metaphor, what happens to the water in
the chalice will also happen to the saints in heaven. By extension, it may happen
to them even on earth in moments of privileged union. Annihilatio too emerges
in a Eucharistic context, in this case a scholastic one. Commentaries on Peter
Lombard’s Sentences often pursue his question of what happens to the substance
of bread when the body of Christ is confected: is the bread simply annihilated?39
Both Aquinas and Bonaventure, writing in the 1250s, conclude that it is not. For
Bonaventure, it would be unfitting if God were to annihilate his own creature
in a sacrament designed to enhance life, not destroy it. Though the bread is no
longer itself, it does not cease to be, but is “transmuted into a better substance.”40
Thomas similarly defines transubstantiation as the conversion, rather than an-
nihilation, of a substance.41 Nevertheless, in typical scholastic fashion, both theo-
logians first assert the proposition they mean to deny, entertaining at some length
the idea that the bread is annihilated when it becomes the body of Christ. It is
easy to see how a mystic, describing either ecstatic union or celestial beatitude,
could combine Bernard’s analogy of the water in wine with the scholastic con-
cern over transubstantiated bread. If the soul is like water that has now become
wine, it is also like the perhaps-annihilated bread that has become the substance
of Christ.
The nuns of Helfta were steeped in Eucharistic piety, and scholastic thought
was not unknown to them.42 For example, the Liber celebrates the reception
of Thomas Aquinas into heaven and explores the disputed question of whether
38
“Da nobis per hujus aquae et vini mysterium, ejus divinitatis esse consortes, qui humanitatis nos-
trae fieri dignatus est particeps”: Ordo Missae, Missale Romanum (Tournai, 1950), 249.
39
“Quid ergo fit de substantia panis et vini? Illi dicunt vel in praeiacentem materiam resolvi, vel
in nihilum redigi”: Peter Lombard, Sententiae in IV libris distinctae IV, dist. 11, cap. 2, art. 5 (Grot-
taferrata, 1971–81), 2:296–99. Cf. Sylvain Piron, “Adnichilatio,” in Mots médiévaux offerts à Ruedi
Imbach, ed. I. Atucha, D. Calma, C. König-Pralong, and I. Zavattero (Oporto, Portugal, 2011), 25.
40
“Non est annihilatio panis, immo in meliorem substantiam commutatio; et ideo transsubstantia-
tio, non annihilatio, talis conversio est”: Bonaventure, Commentaria in quattuor libros Sententiarum
Magistri Petri Lombardi, lib. IV, comm. in dist. 11, pars 1, art. unicus, qu. 3, in Opera omnia, 10 vols.
(Quaracchi, 1882–1901), 4:246.
41
“Praeterea, illud quod in aliquid convertitur, non annihilatur. Sed panis in corpus Christi convertitur,
ut per auctoritates in littera positas ostendi potest. Ergo non annihilatur”: Thomas Aquinas, In IV Sen-
tentiarum, dist. 11, qu. 1, art. 2, sed contra 2, 1st American ed., vols. 6, 7.1, and 7.2 (1948); online in
Library of Latin Texts, Series A (Turnhout, 2005): http://clt.brepolis.net.turing.library.northwestern.edu
/cds/pages/Results.aspx, accessed 19 November 2015.
42
For another instance of German religious women engaged with scholastic thought, see Fiona
J. Griffiths, The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century
(Philadelphia, 2007), 72–75. Griffiths shows that Herrad of Hohenbourg was familiar with Peter
Lombard and Peter Comestor. In the mid-fourteenth century, Henry of Nördlingen advised the nuns
of Maria Medingen to copy Henry Suso’s Horologium sapientiae and to study Thomas Aquinas’s
Summa. The Summa was also translated into German for fourteenth-century nuns: Newman, “Latin
and the Vernaculars,” 234.

certain problematic souls were saved.43 So Mechthild or her scribes could well
have borrowed the term annihilatio from contemporary Eucharistic theology,
probably through one of their Dominican preachers. It is interesting that in her
mystical union, she is not simply annihilata, but annihilata in se. Ceasing to be
“in herself,” she passes “into God,” losing herself in the divine substance just like
the water or the bread.
Annihilatio recurs near the end of the Liber when Mechthild is dying. As her
agony is prolonged, the sisters have completed the prayers for the dying five
times, yet still she lingers. Gertrud, keeping vigil at her friend’s deathbed, under-
stands the reason: Mechthild “would not be assumed into heaven until all her
strength had been utterly consumed and annihilated by divine power, like a drop
of water infused into a jug of wine. Then, putting off all the insipidity of human
nature, she would be plunged into that abyss of all blessedness and deserve to be
made one spirit with God [1 Cor. 6.17].”44 The passage is strikingly close to the
earlier text on mystical union; again we see the citation of 1 Cor. 6.17, the use of
annihilare, the image of water in wine, and the promise of perfect union with the
divine. These parallels reveal that the nuns saw ecstatic moments as a foretaste
of union hereafter, when the soul will be “plunged into that abyss of all blessed-
ness.” Metaphors of the abyss, as Bernard McGinn has shown, are often linked
in mystical discourse to annihilatio.45
The Liber’s fullest account of this celestial, deifying union does not actually use
the term, but fleshes out what the nuns meant by annihilatio.
When the soul of a righteous person leaves the body, if it is so free of all sin that it de-
serves to enter the mysteries of heaven at once, God penetrates that blessed soul with his
divine power as soon as it departs. He so fills and possesses all its senses that he becomes
the eye with which the soul sees, the light by which it sees, and the beauty that it sees.
Thus, in a wonderful and joyful way, God beholds himself, the soul, and all the saints in
and with that soul. He is also the ear with which the soul hears his dulcet words—words
that caress the soul beyond all maternal affection; and the soul hears the harmony of
God himself and all the saints. He is the soul’s sense of smell and its breath, breathing
into it his own divine, life-giving breath, which surpasses the fragrance of all perfumes
and gives life to the soul forever. And he is the soul’s sense of taste, by which it savors his
own sweetness within itself. God is also the voice of the soul, and the tongue with which
he fully and highly praises himself in and for that soul. He is its heart, delighting the soul
and making it glad, enjoying his own delights in and with the soul in the most delicious
pleasure. Finally, God is the soul’s very life and the movement of all its limbs: everything
43
Liber specialis gratiae 5.9, pp. 332–33 (on the entrance of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas
into heaven), and 5.16, p. 344 (on the possible salvation of Solomon, Samson, Origen, and Trajan;
one manuscript adds Aristotle).
44
“Illa quae haec in spiritu cognovit, intellexit quod nondum esset assumenda, donec, virtute divina
omnibus viribus penitus consumptis et annihilatis, tamquam aquae gutta vini dolio infusa, omni
humanitatis insipiditate exuta, ipsi abysso omnis beatitudinis immersa, unus cum eo spiritus effici
mereretur”: Liber specialis gratiae 7.10, p. 404.
45
Bernard McGinn, “The Abyss of Love,” in The Joy of Learning and the Love of God: Studies in
Honor of Jean Leclercq, ed. E. Rozanne Elder (Kalamazoo, 1995), 95–120. See also his discussions
of Jacopone da Todi, Marguerite Porete, and John Tauler, in The Flowering of Mysticism, 126–31
and 244–65, and The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300–1500) (New York, 2005),
263–64, 284–85, 291–93.

the soul does, God himself does within it. In this way that verse is truly fulfilled in the
saints: “God shall be all in all” for them [1 Cor. 15.28].46
This lyrical passage returns to Bernard’s idea in De diligendo Deo, the nuns’
source for the simile of water in wine. In heaven when “God shall be all in all,”
nothing human will remain in man. Every sense and faculty will be totally pos-
sessed and transformed by God such that he is not only the object of the soul’s glo-
rified perception, but also the subject who sees, hears, praises, and enjoys himself
within that soul. If this is what Mechthild and her friends meant by annihilating
union, it recalls Gerson’s famous remark about Marguerite Porete (whom he knew
under the name of Marie de Valenciennes). With her “almost incredible subtlety,”
he opined in 1401, the beguine could scarcely have written anything loftier about
divine fruition in heaven. But, led astray by spiritual pride mingled with passionate
love, she erred in making such claims about pilgrims on earth.47 In short, language
about annihilating union and divine possession was perfectly orthodox in one
context, suspect in the other—though, to return to Lerner’s point, it often flew
beneath the radar. No taint of heterodoxy ever touched Mechthild, Gertrud, or
their collective writing project.
One further aspect of this passage deserves attention. Although the soul’s union
with God is complete and deifying, it is not indistinct union because, in their
perfect coinherence, God and the soul remain two beings united in love, not “one
single One,” as Meister Eckhart would say. Nor does God perceive only himself
within the soul: he “beholds himself, the soul, and all the saints in and with that
soul.” In fact, the saints are mentioned no fewer than three times. No other mysti-
cal book focuses so keenly on the joys of heaven—and here the women of Helfta
reveal their Benedictine roots. Mechthild knows her favorite saints by sight and
greets them on their feast days; they often appear in visions, engaged in a joyful
gift exchange with their friends on earth. Community, so profoundly important
at Helfta, becomes even more important hereafter. Thus union with God does
not result (as it does for Marguerite and some later mystics) in any loss of name,
identity, or remembrance. That, finally, is why “annihilating union” as the nuns
conceived it remains compatible with writing. Though Mechthild wants no credit
46
“Cum anima justi egreditur de corpore, si tam libera est ab omnibus peccatis, ut coeli secreta
statim promeruerit intrare, in primo egressu animam illam felicem Deus sic penetrat sua divina vir-
tute, omnesque sensus ejus sic replet et possidet, ut ipse sit oculus animae quo videt, et lux per quam
videt, et decor qui videtur: ut miro et jucundissimo modo Deus in anima et cum anima seipsum, et
animam et omnes Sanctos speculetur. Est etiam auditus animae, quo audit dulciflua eloquia sua, qui-
bus animae supra omnem maternum blanditur affectum, et quo anima audit ipsius Dei et omnium
Sanctorum concentum. Odoratus quoque animae est et spiramen, spirans ei vivificum et divinum fla-
tum suimetipsius, vincentem omnem odoris fragrantiam, quo anima in aeternum vivificatur. Est etiam
animae gustus, quo suimetipsius dulcedinem in anima sapit. Item ipse Deus est vox et lingua animae,
qua seipsum in anima et pro anima plenissime et altissime laudat. Ipse quoque est cor animae, delec-
tans et jucundans animam, et fruens deliciis suis in anima et cum anima in jucundissima delectatione.
Est insuper Deus vita animae, et motus omnium membrorum ejus, ut omne quod anima agit, ipse
Deus in ea agere videatur, ut illud vere in Sanctis impleatur: Erit eis Deus omnia in omnibus”: Liber
specialis gratiae 5.21, p. 352.
47
“Vix altius quicquam de divina fruitione, quoad aliqua, dici potuerat; sed fallebat eam sua tumi-
ditas animi tantae passioni dilectionis immixta”: Jean Gerson, “De distinctione verarum revelationum
a falsis,” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, ed. Palémon Glorieux (Paris, 1962), 51–52.

for authorship, she is pleased in the end that the Liber specialis gratiae, a book
written by and for her sisters, should bear her name. As she, now herself a saint,
tells Gertrud from the other side of death, “I know that this is the will of my
God and increases his praise, and it will bring benefit to my neighbors. Indeed,
that book will be called a light of the church, because those who read it will be
illumined with the light of knowledge.”48
The nuns of Helfta had what we might call a house style. They wrote a spacious,
unhurried Latin, weighted with superlatives, sweetened with so many iterations
of dulcis and suavis as to verge on the sentimental. Within the Liber, it is impos-
sible on stylistic grounds to tell Gertrud’s sections from those of the anonymous
scribe or, for that matter, the tiny part by Mechthild’s own hand.49 Further, the
Liber is stylistically of a piece with the Legatus, written partly by Gertrud (book 2),
partly by anonymous nuns (books 1 and 3–5). Despite Mechthild’s anxiety about
authorship, the overall tone of her book is confident, scarcely apologizing (as do
many mystical works) for the inadequacy of its language. Only once does a scribe
assert that what is written “is very little in comparison with what has been left
out” (because Mechthild did not reveal everything she saw). The same writer
adds, “Sometimes what she saw was so spiritual that she could by no means ex-
plain it in words.”50 But that is all. Far different is the case of Angela’s book, one
of the great exemplars of apophasis in all mystical literature.
Angela of Foligno: Annihilation, Abjection, and Radical Poverty
Angela, like Mechthild, did not personally write the book that bears her name.
But Mechthild was highly literate, while Angela did not know Latin and prob-
ably could not write. Whether she could read in the vernacular remains uncer-
tain. Editors divide her book into two more or less equal parts: the Memorial, a
narrative of her spiritual journey, and the Instructions, a set of homiletic materi-
als transcribed by disciples late in her life and after her death in 1309. Written
c. 1291–97, the Memorial is a collaborative work of Angela and her confessor,
“Brother A.,” a Franciscan friar and kinsman. This scribe translated her oral
testimony, given over many years in her Umbrian dialect, into a peculiar Latin
marked by tics of notarial style, with many reminiscences of the vernacular.51 The
complete book has been printed and translated over the centuries under a variety
of titles because it actually has none. Following its most recent editors, I will call
48
“Maximum gaudium meum est; quia Dei mei laudem et voluntatem, et utilitatem proximorum
ex eo proventuram agnosco. Liber namque ille lumen Ecclesiae vocabitur, quia ipsum legentes, lumine
cognitionis illustrabuntur”: Liber specialis gratiae 7.17, pp. 412–13.
49
Liber specialis gratiae 4.59, pp. 310–15, is the only chapter actually written by Mechthild. It
consists of four letters of spiritual direction to “a certain secular matron who was a friend of hers,”
probably a widow who had entered religious life.
50
“Omnia quae scripta continentur quasi pauca sunt, respectu omissorum; nam veraciter praesumo
dicere quod multa plura saepius sibi revelata sunt, quae nequaquam dicere volebat. . . . Aliquando
vero tam spirituale erat quod videbat, quod nullo modo verbis potuit explicare”: Liber spiritualis
gratiae 2.43, p. 193.
51
Pascale Bourgain, “Angèle de Foligno: Le latin du Liber,” in Angèle de Foligno: Le dossier, ed.
Giulia Barone and Jacques Dalarun (Rome, 1999), 145–67.

it simply the Libro, using Italian to distinguish its title from Mechthild’s. Like 52
the Liber specialis gratiae, Angela’s Libro follows standard hagiographic prac-
tice and refrains from naming her; she is simply “Christ’s faithful one” (fidelis
Christi). Only the oldest manuscript (Assisi, Biblioteca comunale, MS 342) iden-
tifies her as “Soror Lella,” a diminutive of Angela.53
Ubertino da Casale, the fiery Spiritual Franciscan leader, also names her, saying
that at the age of twenty-five he met “the reverend and most holy mother, Angela
of Foligno, who lived a truly angelic life on earth.”54 It was her profound insight
into his soul that led to his spiritual rebirth, he adds. Even though some slander
her blameless life, she is in his eyes an incarnation of Divine Wisdom: “In the lives
of her many spiritual children, she becomes a mother of fair love and of fear, of
greatness and of holy hope; for all good things come to them together with her”
(Sir. 24.24, Wisd. 7.11).55 Ubertino may also have written the hagiographic (and
polemical) epilogue to her Instructions, which is found in some but not all manu-
scripts.56 It contains a very similar but even more emphatic conflation of Angela
with Lady Wisdom:
May all shame therefore depart far from the children of a holy generation! And learn
from Angela, as from the Angel of Great Counsel (ab Angela magni consilii),57 the way
of the riches of the wisdom of Christ’s Cross [Rom. 11.33, 1 Cor. 1.23–24], which is
poverty, suffering, and contempt, along with true obedience to the good Jesus and his
most sweet Mother. You can teach this to men and women and all creation with the
52
Il Libro della beata Angela da Foligno, ed. Ludger Thier and Abele Calufetti (Grottaferrata,
1985). I have used the translation by Paul Lachance, Angela of Foligno: Complete Works (New York,
1993), with occasional changes. A newer edition includes only the Memorial: Angela da Foligno,
Memoriale, ed. Enrico Menestò (Florence, 2013).
53
Attilio Bartoli Langeli, “Il codice di Assisi, ovvero il Liber sororis Lelle,” in Angèle de Foligno,
ed. Barone and Dalarun, 7–27.
54
“Vigesimoquinto autem anno etatis mee . . . ad reuerende matris & sanctissime angele de ful-
gineo uere angelice uite in terris me adduxit noticiam”: Ubertino da Casale, Arbor vitae crucifixae
Jesu, prologue (Venice, 1485; reprint Turin, 1961), 5. Ubertino was born in 1259, so this would place
their meeting in 1284. A group of fifteenth-century Netherlandish manuscripts (probably from De-
votio Moderna circles) say the meeting took place in the twenty-fifth year of Ubertino’s religious life
(reading religionis rather than etatis), making it as late as 1298. The difference is significant because,
if we trust the earliest manuscript of Ubertino, Angela was already renowned enough to have dis-
ciples even before the hypothetical date of her conversion (1285) conjectured by M.-J. Ferré, in “Les
principales dates de la vie d’Angèle de Foligno,” Revue d’histoire franciscaine 2 (1925): 21–34. For
discussion see Jacques Dalarun, “Angèle de Foligno a-t-elle existé?,” in “Alla Signorina”: Mélanges
offerts à Noëlle de la Blanchardière (Rome, 1995), 59–97, at 67.
55
“Ac per hoc uelint nolint emuli detrahentes sanctitati irreprehensibilis uite illius sanctissime an-
ime: & mutationi diuine: que ad eius uerbum & meritum oritur in uita multorum spiritualium filio-
rum: fit mater pulchre dilectionis timoris & magnitudinis & sancte spei: quia ueniunt eis omnia bona
pariter cum illa”: Ubertino da Casale, Arbor vitae, 5. Magnitudinis (greatness) is probably an error
for agnitionis (knowledge) in the biblical text.
56
This is the position of Romana Guarnieri, “Santa Angela? Angela, Ubertino e lo spiritualismo
francescano. Prime ipotesi sulla Peroratio,” in Barone and Dalarun, Angèle de Foligno, 203–65. It
is strengthened by the parallel identifications of Angela with Wisdom in the epilogue and the Arbor
vitae as noted here.
57
The writer puns on Angela’s name, identifying her with the “angel of great counsel” in Isa. 9.6
(LXX). Although this phrase does not appear in the Vulgate, it was familiar from the introit of the
third Mass of Christmas.

tongue of effective works. And that you may glory in your calling to so great a disciple-
ship, dearest ones, know that she is a teacher of the discipline of God and makes choice
of his works [Wisd. 8.4]. And truly she is a luminous brightness, a spotless mirror of
God’s majesty, and an image of his goodness [Wisd. 7.26]. Although she is one, she can
do all things. And remaining in herself, she makes all things new, and enters into holy
souls throughout the nations, and makes all her children friends of God and prophets of
truth [Wisd. 7.27]. And truly [God] loves no one [Wisd. 7.28] who attacks Angela, or
rather the way, the life, and the teaching of Christ.58
Ubertino’s Spiritual allegiance and Angela’s emphasis on the total poverty of
Christ suggest that she too found her companions within the radical wing of the
Franciscan movement.59 This impression is strengthened by a reference to the
Spirituals’ “angelic pope” Celestine V in the Memorial and confirmed by a Testi-
ficatio, or approbation, from Cardinal Giacomo Colonna, their staunch defender.
That notice appears in the majority of Latin manuscripts, but stands under era-
sure in the earliest, the Assisi manuscript (c. 1310–11), because Cardinal Colonna
fell afoul of Boniface VIII and was excommunicated in May 1297. Their quarrel,
along with the subsequent persecution of the Spirituals, exerted a lasting chill on
the early circulation of the Libro.
In sharp contrast to Mechthild, who was cloistered from the age of seven, the
matron of Foligno married and bore children. Her narrative has long startled
readers with its declaration that, soon after she embarked on the way of penance,
God fulfilled her desire for greater detachment from the world: “My mother, who
had been a great obstacle to me, died. In like manner my husband died, as did
all my children in a short space of time. Because I had already entered the afore-
said way, and had prayed to God for their death, I felt a great consolation when
it happened.”60 Scholars have invariably felt a need to gloss this confession (or
boast)—which Angela does qualify in a later passage.61 However it may be, her
58
“Procul ergo a sanctae geniturae filiis omnis pudor abscedat, et ab Angela magni consilii viam
divitiarum sapientiae crucis Christi addiscite, quae est paupertas, dolor et despectus <et vera oboedi-
entia> boni Jesu et dulcissimae suae Matris, quam viros et mulieres et omnem creaturam lingua
efficacium operum doceatis. Et ut gloriemini in vocatione tanti discipulatus, scitote, carissimi, quod
ipsa est doctrix disciplinae Dei et electrix operum illius. Et vere ipsa est candor lucis et speculum sine
macula Dei maiestatis et imago bonitatis illius. Et cum sit una, omnia potest. Et in se permanens, om-
nia innovat, et per nationes in animas sanctas se transfert, et omnes filios suos amicos Dei et prophetas
veritatis constituit. Et vere neminem diligit, qui Angelam, immo viam et vitam Christi et doctrinam
impugnat”: epilogus, in Thier and Calufetti, Libro, 742. My translation.
59
This long-standing view is endorsed by Lachance in his introduction to Angela of Foligno, 109–
13; strongly argued by Guarnieri in “Santa Angela?”; and cautiously supported by David Burr, The
Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century after Saint Francis (University Park,
PA, 2001), 334–44. Alfonso Marini is more skeptical: “Ubertino e Angela: L’Arbor vitae e il Liber,”
in Barone and Dalarun, Angèle de Foligno, 319–44.
60
“Et factum est, volente Deo, quod illo tempore mortua fuit mater mea, quae erat mihi magnum
impedimentum. Et postea mortuus est vir meus et omnes filii in brevi tempore. Et quia incoeperam
viam praedictam [penitentiae] et rogaveram Deum quod morerentur, magnam consolationem inde
habui scilicet de morte eorum”: Memorial, cap. 1, ninth step, in Thier and Calufetti, Libro 138; trans.
Lachance, 126. I have replaced “sons” (filii) with “children.”
61
Catherine M. Mooney, “The Changing Fortunes of Angela of Foligno, Daughter, Mother, and
Wife,” in History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person, ed. Rachel
Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger (New York, 2007), 56–67, 307–10.

refusal to mourn signals a consistent feature of her account: her way of enacting
divine love is flamboyantly shocking. Imitating Saint Francis, she strips herself
naked before a crucifix; ostentatiously if gradually sheds her considerable wealth;
grows so fervent in her love of God that whenever someone speaks of him, she
screams; and during a pilgrimage to Assisi, collapses at the portal of the church,
shouting with inarticulate cries, “Love still unknown, why? why? why?” It is at
this point that she attracts the notice of Brother A., whose first response is to be
mortified on behalf of the family. As Angela’s confessor, he compels her to report
the experience that had inspired her screaming fit, fearing that a demon was to
blame. He initially intends to submit his written account to a third party, skilled
in the discernment of spirits. But his doubts are soon overcome by awe at An-
gela’s mystical graces, so that never happens. For her part, she willingly complies
with his writing project, warning that the few scraps of paper he has brought will
be insufficient. He will need a large notebook.
From this point the Memorial grows. Its first chapter retrospectively compresses
Angela’s earlier experiences into nineteen “steps” on a spiritual journey. Chap-
ters 3 through 9 recount seven “supplementary steps” at greater length in real
time, for she describes these agonies and ecstasies, sublime visions and torment-
ing doubts, to Brother A. even as she is undergoing them. Her mysticism centers
on the Deus homo passionatus, “the God-man in his Passion,”62 whom she sees
in several intimate visions. At one point she even embraces him in his tomb on
Holy Saturday. Following a distinctly Franciscan form of imitatio Christi, Angela
strives to imitate the God-man in “poverty, suffering, and contempt,” a triad that
recurs frequently in the Libro.63 With her socia or companion M., she also en-
gages in charitable work, such as caring for lepers.64 On one memorable occasion,
the women drink the bath water in which they have washed a leper; Angela finds
in it the sweetness of Holy Communion. This partiality for the abject has made
her a favorite with postmodern French thinkers,65 but there is more to her spiri-
tuality. She may strike a modern reader as spiritually bipolar, veering between
ecstatic union and crushing despair, utter certainty of God’s favor and lacerating
doubt. But eventually her path takes a turn toward the apophatic. Overlapping
with the sixth step, the most tormented phase of her journey, is a final stage in
which she is granted deep comprehension of the Trinity “in and with darkness.”
62
This striking term appears once in the Memorial and repeatedly in the Instructions. The word
passionatus translates the Italian pasionato; it does not appear in medieval Latin before Angela. If she
had meant simply “the suffering God-man,” her scribes could have used patiens. The meaning here
seems to combine “suffering” with “impassioned” or even “passionate.”
63
Diane Tomkinson, “‘Poverty, Suffering, and Contempt’ in the Theology and Practice of Angela of
Foligno: Problem or Resource?,” in “Her Bright Merits”: Essays Honoring Ingrid Peterson, O.S.F.,
ed. Mary Walsh Meany and Felicity Dorsett (Saint Bonaventure, NY, 2012), 111–26.
64
Joy A. Schroeder, “Female Companionship in Angela of Foligno’s Liber: The Role of Angela’s
Socia (‘Masazuola’),” in Meany and Dorsett, Her Bright Merits, 127–42.
65
Georges Bataille, Le coupable (Paris, 1944); Luce Irigaray, “La mystérique,” in Speculum de
l’autre femme (Paris, 1974); Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection (Paris, 1980);
Cristina Mazzoni, “Feminism, Abjection, Transgression: Angela of Foligno and the Twentieth Cen-
tury,” Mystics Quarterly 17 (1991): 61–70.

After recording this seventh supplementary step, Brother A. completed his first
redaction of the Memorial and obtained the Testificatio from his order.66
In the meantime, Angela had attracted a following of men and women, in-
cluding many friars, whom she taught and directed. It was these disciples who
in the last decade of her life recorded her teachings and a few letters, assembled
under the rubric of Instructions. Angela could not exercise the same control over
their writing that she did over Brother A. (d. c. 1300), who had strenuously—if
somewhat disingenuously—insisted that he recorded her words just as she spoke
them, adding nothing.67 The core of these teachings does stem from Angela, but
the wording does not, so recent scholarship has tended to use the Instructions
with caution. Interestingly, annihilatio is not found in the Memorial, yet occurs
in three of the Instructions. So we cannot be certain whether Angela herself used
the term. She could have acquired it late in her career, or it could have been in-
troduced by one or more disciples. But the Libro shows that it was current in her
Spiritual Franciscan milieu, with connotations quite different from those that we
see in Mechthild.
Three of the four usages occur in reference to Christ. Instruction 18 teaches
that anyone enabled by divine grace to see the “suffering God-man, so poor and
full of continual and indescribable pain, so despised and totally annihilated,”
would surely “follow him in poverty, and continual suffering, contempt, and
vileness.”68 Such annihilation refers not only to Christ’s suffering in the Passion,
but more profoundly to the kenosis of the Word. This becomes clearer in Instruc-
tion 22, where Angela teaches that, out of pure love, the Creator so “annihilated
himself” as to humble his power beneath even irrational and senseless creatures.69
Because He Who Is, the very author of life, “wished to be annihilated and made
subject to all creatures, even the insensible ones,” those who had been spiritu-
ally dead and insensible to the divine can have life through his self-abasement.
God’s annihilatio thus confounds the pride of human nihilitas: ultimate reality is
reduced to nothing, in order to deflate the nothingness that imagined it was some-
66
Maria Pia Alberzoni, “L’‘approbatio’: Curia romana, Ordine minoritico e Liber,” in Barone and
Dalarun, Angèle de Foligno, 293–318.
67
Angela’s collaboration with Brother A. has been much discussed. See Catherine M. Mooney, “The
Authorial Role of Brother A. in the Composition of Angela of Foligno’s Revelations,” in Creative
Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance, ed. E. Ann Mat-
ter and John Coakley (Philadelphia, 1994), 34–63; John W. Coakley, “Hagiography and Theology
in the Memorial of Angela of Foligno,” in Women, Men, and Spiritual Power, 111–29; and Emore
Paoli, “Parole di donna, scritture di uomini: Angela da Foligno, Margherita da Cortona, Chiara da
Montefalco,” in Amicitiae sensibus: Studi in onore di don Mario Sensi, ed. Alessandra Bartolomei
Romagnoli and Fortunato Frezza (Foligno, 2011), 215–28.
68
“Unde quicumque videret istum Deum hominem passionatum ita pauperrimum et plenissimum
ineffabili dolore et continuo et ita despectissimum et omnino annihilatum, . . . sequeretur ipsum et
per paupertatem et per continuum dolorem et despectum et vilitatem”: Instructio 18, in Thier and
Calufetti, Libro, 582–84; trans. Lachance, 272.
69
“Et ipse Creator tantum solum ob tui amorem se annihilavit, tantum se ob tui amorem deiecit et
humiliavit quod non solum rationali creaturae sed etiam ipsis irrationabilibus et insensibilibus crea-
turis plenissimam potestatem dedit ut suum super eum exercerent officium”: Instructio 22, in Thier
and Calufetti, Libro, 604.

thing. Thus the primary context of annihilatio in Angela is not mystical union
70
or eucharistic transformation, as in Mechthild, but kenotic Christology.

These passages help to illumine the fourth, most interesting occurrence of the
term. Instruction 2 deals with the perils of spiritual love, including a veiled po-
lemic against the Free Spirit heresy (which becomes considerably less veiled in
a later manuscript).71 Yet this is also the point where Angela’s teaching comes
closest to Marguerite Porete’s. She speaks of what happens to the soul when it
receives an experience of Uncreated Love (amor increatus). The soul must act to
prepare itself for this unitive vision, but once Uncreated Love has entered, the
soul can do nothing, for Love alone acts: ad quem amorem novum anima op-
eratur et non operatur punctum, quia ipse amor increatus operatur.72 As Angela
teaches, Love “does all the good that is done through us, and we do all the evil.
And this is the true annihilation: to see in truth that we are not the agents of any
good.”73 Annihilation, then, is a form of mystical self-knowledge. It is not the
same as Christ’s annihilation, which is a metaphysical self-emptying: He Who Is
subjects himself to that which is not. Conversely, what is noughted in the mystic’s
annihilation is a false perception. The annihilated soul does not cease to exist, but
it comes to understand that God or Uncreated Love is the sole agent of all good.
The soul at best is only a vehicle.
The link between these two rather different senses of annihilatio is kenosis.
God in Christ embraces such radical poverty that he empties himself of divine life
and power, which he pours into his sinful creature. The creature in turn empties
itself of pride, which consists in false power, false riches, and false knowledge.
By forsaking its own agency and choosing to follow Christ in “poverty, suffering,
and contempt,” the soul acknowledges and accepts its own inherent poverty. In
this way it becomes capable of union with the poor Christ, the Deus homo pas-
sionatus, who eventually reveals himself as Uncreated Love. Interestingly, Angela
does not use annihilare to describe ecstasy, although she or her scribes do apply
its near-synonym inabyssare in this sense. In Instruction 4, thought to be one of
the most authentic, Angela has a vision of her spiritual children “transformed
into God, such that I see nothing else in them but God, now glorious, now suffer-
ing, so that he seems to have totally transubstantiated and ‘abyssated’ them into
himself.”74 Here is a more explicit statement of the Eucharistic analogy we have
glimpsed in Mechthild.
70
“Sed profundissima et fidelissima et omnino inusitata humilitas istius altissimae maiestatis depri-
mat et confundat superbiam nostrae nihilitatis! Voluit enim esse subiectus et annihilatus ipse Auctor
omnis vitae, ipse qui solus est, ab omnibus creaturis ipsis etiam insensibilibus, ut tu, qui mortuus eras
et divinorum insensibilis factus, per hanc humillimam eius deiectionem vitam haberes”: ibid., 608.
71
Lachance, Angela of Foligno, notes to the Instructions, 396–97.
72
“The soul both works toward this new love and does no work at all, for Uncreated Love itself
does the work”: Instructio 2, in Thier and Calufetti, Libro, 436.
73
“Et ipse [amor] operatur omne bonum quod per nos operatur, et nos operamur omne malum.
Et ista est vera annihilatio, videre in veritate quod nos non sumus operatores alicuis boni”: ibid.,
436–38; my translation.
74
“Ipsi videntur transformati in Deum sic quod quasi nihil in eis aliud video quam Deum, nunc
gloriosum nunc passionatum, ita quod istos videtur totaliter in se transsubstantiasse et inabyssasse”:
Instructio 4, in Thier and Calufetti, Libro, 500.

In Angela’s case, however, the impetus for annihilatio derived not from Cister-
cian mysticism but from Franciscan hagiography. As Sean Field has shown, the
influential preacher Gilbert of Tournai wrote a cluster of sermons on Francis in
the early 1250s, using the idea of self-annihilation to describe his spiritual perfec-
tion. “The grace of the Holy Spirit,” Gilbert preached, “inflames the soul with the
ardor of charity in conversion, transforms it in religious life (conversacione), and
annihilates it in perfection when it reckons itself as nothing.”75 The proof text is
Job 30.15, Redactus sum in nichilum: “I have been reduced to nothing.” Saint
Francis experienced all three forms of grace, culminating in his self-annihilation:
“For the more perfect someone is, the more he recoils at his own littleness, anni-
hilating himself.”76 Gilbert explains that there are three senses of nichil: in reputa-
tion, when something modest is reckoned to be nothing at all; in transmutation,
when something is so changed that nothing of its old identity remains; and in
abolition, when it simply ceases to be. Francis was “reduced to nothing” in all
three ways, first by depriving himself of temporal goods (which he reckoned as
nothing); then by passing so far into God in thought and affection that “noth-
ing of human feeling remained in him” (an echo of Saint Bernard); and finally
by realizing his own nothingness through constant meditation on eternity. Thus
his core virtues of poverty, charity, and humility are all reimagined as aspects
of self-annihilation—a powerful new approach to the soul’s perfection. Gilbert
preached this sermon to an academic audience in Paris around 1255, at the same
time that Thomas and Bonaventure were reflecting on the annihilation (or not)
of the substantia panis in their Sentence commentaries. More important, the text
was incorporated into a collection of Sermones dominicales et de sanctis that
Gilbert compiled at the request of Pope Alexander IV (d. 1261). That collection
proved to be hugely popular: it survives in 117 complete manuscripts, in addition
to many more containing individual sermons.77
Franciscans clearly took note of this sermon on their founder. When Bonaven-
ture was called to defend mendicant poverty against the attacks of William of
Saint-Amour in Paris, he adopted the theme of self-annihilation in his Questiones
de perfectione evangelica (1255). “A man is truly wise,” the future minister gen-
eral wrote, “when he truthfully recognizes his own nothingness (nihilitatem) and
that of others—and the sublimity of the First Principle. . . . To know one’s own
nothingness is what it means to humble oneself.”78 This theme may have been es-
pecially congenial to the Spirituals because annihilatio could gloss their insistence
75
“Sic igitur gracia spiritus sancti in anima ipsam ardore caritatis inflammat in conversione, mutat
in conversacione, adnichilat cum nichil se reputat in perfeccione”: Gilbert of Tournai, Sermo in trans-
latione B. Francisci, Inflammatum est cor meum, ed. Sean Field, in “Annihilation and Perfection in
Two Sermons by Gilbert of Tournai for the Translation of St. Francis,” Franciscana 1 (1999): 237–74,
at 259.
76
“Quanto enim quis perfeccior est tanto magis in propriam resilit parvitatem adnichilando
seipsum”: ibid., 269.
77
Field, “Annihilation and Perfection,” 239 n. 5.
78
“Ille vere sapiens est qui veraciter recognoscit suam et aliorum nihilitatem et primi principii
sublimitatem . . . sui autem nihilitatem cognoscere, hoc est se ipsum humiliare”: Bonaventure, Ques-
tiones de perfectione evangelica, in Opera omnia, 5:120–21.

on radical poverty. Petrus Ioannis Olivi discussed annihilation in many contexts,
describing “perfect humiliation of oneself [as] the highest form of martyrdom.”79
We find a similar idea in the Laude, or divine poems, of Angela’s fellow Spiritual
Franciscan, Jacopone da Todi (d. 1306). Several of these Laude, especially the late
poems written in prison in the 1290s, speak of nihil, nichilità, and annichilare.80
Contemporary with Angela’s Libro, they are composed in the same Umbrian
dialect that she spoke.
For Jacopone, annihilation is less a penitential than a mystical concept. Cre-
ated ex nihilo by God, the soul is founded on a metaphysical void or nothingness.
Until it acknowledges and returns to that state, it can never be united with Truth
in perfect love. This self-annihilation, itself a divine work within the soul, has
several dimensions: humility, poverty, self-surrender, and a kind of will-lessness
in which the human will is replaced by the will of God. Paradoxically, the soul’s
loftiest flight into the divine is predicated on its sheer nothingness (nichilità):
This most supreme summit
is founded on nothing:
a formed nothingness
set in its Lord.
O lofty nothingness,
your action is so powerful
that it opens every door
and enters into the infinite.81
In a closely related lauda Jacopone writes:

Faith and Hope have estranged me from myself,
Struck at my heart, annihilated me.
Within and without I am shattered,
Reduced to nothingness.82
79
“Perfecta sui humiliatio summum genus martirii et holocausti apud deum”: Petrus Ioannis Olivi,
Lectura super Matheum 18 (Rome, Collegio San Isidoro, MS I/56, fol. 119v), cited in Piron, “Ad-
nichilatio,” 28 n. 28.
80
Jacopone was among the Spiritual Franciscans who signed a manifesto denouncing Boniface VIII
as illegitimate on 10 May 1297. The pope’s forces besieged the Colonna family’s fortress in Palestrina,
where the Spirituals had taken refuge, and conquered it after a year and a half. Jacopone was con-
demned to life in prison, but released by the new pope, Benedict XI, in 1303. His last three laude on
mystical annihilation are assigned to this period: Serge Hughes, introduction to Jacopone da Todi,
The Lauds, trans. Serge and Elizabeth Hughes (New York, 1982), 55–63; McGinn, The Flowering of
Mysticism, 125–31; Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans, 100–107.
81
“Questa sì summa altezza / en nichil è fundata, / nichilità enformata, / messa en lo suo Signore. //
Alta nichilitate, / tuo atto è tanto forte, / che <o>pre tutte porte / et entr’êllo ’nfinito” Lauda 92.337–
44, in Iacopone da Todi, Laude, ed. Franco Mancini (Rome, 1974), 304–5. The translation is mine,
though I have consulted the excellent version of Hughes and Hughes. Unfortunately, the Italian
and English editions have unrelated systems of numbering. In the English version this is no. 91,
pp. 271–72.
82
“La Fede e la Speranza / m’ò fatta sbandesone, / dato m’ò calcia al core, / fatta m’ò anichillare. //
Anichillato so’ dentro e de fore / e ’n ciò che se pò dire”: Lauda 90.1–6, in Mancini, Laude, 289; trans.
Hughes and Hughes, no. 92, p. 274.

Though it is not possible to specify an exact relationship between Jacopone and
Angela, they moved in a small world and surely knew about each other. Jacopone
could have been an early reader of the Memorial, and Angela or her disciples
could have known the Laude by the time the Instructions were completed. But
it is not necessary to posit either case, for the language of annihilation and its
related metaphor, drowning in the divine abyss, were clearly current among the
Spirituals. The teaching ascribed to Angela—that we experience “true annihila-
tion” once we see “that we are not the agents of any good”—could be understood
as the mode of entry into the mystical state lauded by Jacopone.
That teaching is consistent with the fiercely penitential tone of the Libro. The
Instructions suggest that Angela was troubled by the authority her disciples as-
cribed to her, especially when it was vested in writing. In Instruction 7 (c. 1298),
she dictates a letter that begins: “I am blinded, filled with darkness, and without
any truth. Therefore, my little children, suspect, as from an evil person, all the
words you hear from me. Carefully evaluate everything I say, and do not believe
any of my words unless they match those of Jesus Christ. I find no pleasure in
writing to you now. I am compelled to do so because of the many letters you
have written to me.”83 Such expressions of self-doubt are continuous with the
vacillations of the Memorial. But these words could also be construed as a portal
to annihilation, a path to the divine abyss. By acknowledging publicly that she
is not the agent of any good, Angela exposes her own darkness to the light of
truth—and so invites Love to annihilate it. In Instruction 9, she asks her disciples
to “forgive me my pride—I who am the proudest of all and a daughter of pride—
if I dare to admonish you and lead you in the direction of humility, even though
I am the very contrary of humility.”84 Teaching and writing, even through the
mediation of scribes, convey authority and are thus occasions for pride, which
Angela can exorcise only by exaggerating it. Put differently, the only way she can
demonstrate true humility is by proclaiming her complete lack of it.
This paradox is carried to an astonishing extreme in Instruction 1. Not all
manuscripts include this text, which was probably written c. 1310 after Angela’s
death, but it voices a hagiographic hyperbole grounded in teachings like those I
have just cited. Plunged into an “abyss of humility” (inabyssata), Angela is made
to say, she saw “the superabundance of [her] malice, iniquity, and sins” so fully
that she “wanted to parade naked through towns and public squares with pieces
of meat and fish hanging from [her] neck and to proclaim: ‘Behold the lowest of
women, full of malice and deceit, stinking with every vice and evil.’”85 She goes
on to confess that her whole religious life has been sheer hypocrisy, for all she
83
“Ego sum occaecata et obtenebrata et sine veritate. Et ideo, filioli mei, omnia verba quae habetis
a me, habeatis suspecta sicut a persona maligna; et omnia bene notetis et nullis verbis credatis, nisi
illis quae similantur vestigiis Jesu Christi. Non me delectat modo scribere; sed propter multas litteras,
quas mittitis, cogor vobis scribere”: Instructio 7, in Thier and Calufetti, Libro, 532; trans. Lachance,
259 (changing “sons” to “little children”).
84
“Parcatis superbiae meae, quod ego superbissima et filia superbiae audeam vos monere et ad
viam humilitatis inducere, cum sim tota contraria ipsi humilitati”: Instructio 9, in Thier and Calufetti,
Libro, 548; trans. Lachance, 263. Some manuscripts read veritas rather than humilitas.
85
“Ista abyssus in tantum fecit me videre et superabundare malitias meas et iniquitates et peccata
mea. . . . Et vellem ire nuda per civitates et plateas et appendere ad collum meum pisces et carnes

ever wanted was to be admired as a saint. Then she turns to her disciples and
exclaims:
Do not believe me any more! Do you not see that I am possessed by the devil? You who
are called my children, pray that God in his justice may chase the demons from my soul
and uncover my most wicked deeds, so that God may no longer be dishonored because
of me. Do you not see that everything I have said to you was false? Are you not aware
that if suddenly the whole world was empty of malice the abundance of mine would
suffice to fill it all? Do not believe me any more! Stop adoring this idol. The devil is in
her, and everything she has told you was a pack of lies and diabolical!86
Even if Angela did not use precisely these words, both the hyperbole and the
expressions of self-loathing are true to her spirit. They give concrete form to her
teaching on “true annihilation,” the sine qua non for mystical union.
Here again, she stands close to her compatriot, Jacopone da Todi. In his ter-
rifying Lauda 16, the friar recounts his vision of a damned soul. She had been a
cloistered nun for seventy years: a chaste virgin and ascetic famed for her silence,
her poverty and fasting, her ferocious self-torment. Indeed, many had hoped for
her canonization. But this would-be saint, now tortured in hell, confesses that
despite all those virtues,
humility—ah, humility—was lacking
And that is why God has cast me off.
.............................
What I thirsted for was praise.
When I heard people call me “the saint”
My heart would preen its feathers;
And now I find myself here in Hell,
With those beyond all hope.87
Jacopone’s poem and Instruction 1 are cut from the same cloth. The friar vividly
imagines the damnation of a woman like Angela, albeit cloistered. To the world
she appears a marvel of holiness, while God alone sees the pride and hypocrisy
in her heart and so condemns her. Angela dreads that fate so much that she takes
pains to confess her pride and hypocrisy here and now, in order to destroy the
reputation for sanctity that would damn her too if it were allowed to stand. So far
has the penitential spirit gone, in pursuit of this paradox, that Angela’s disciples
offered their backhanded praise not by lauding her virtues, but by exaggerating
dicendo: Haec est illa vilissima mulier, plena malitiae et simulationis et sentina omnium vitiorum et
malorum”: Instructio 1, in Thier and Calufetti, Libro, 404; trans. Lachance, 219.
86
“Nolite mihi plus credere. Nonne videtis vos quomodo ego sum indaemoniata? Vos, qui dicti estis
filii, rogate istam iustitiam Dei ut exeant daemonia de anima mea et manifestent nequissima opera mea
ut non plus vituperetur Deus per me. Et nonne videtis vos quod omnia quae dixi vobis sunt falsa? Et
nonne perpenditis quod si non esset malitia in toto mundo ego fornirem totum mundum de abundan-
tia malitiae meae? Nolite mihi plus credere, nolite plus adorare idolum istud, quia intus in isto idolo
iacet diabolus et omnia quae locuta sum vobis fuerunt verba simulativa et diabolica”: Instructio 1,
in Thier and Calufetti, Libro, 406; trans. Lachance, 220.
87
“Non ce abi omeletate; / però da Deo fui reprobata. // . . . tutta la me’ entenziöne / fo ad essere
laudata. // Quanno odia clamar ‘la santa’, / lo cor meo superbia ennalta. // Or so’ menata a la malta /
co la gente desperata”: Lauda 37.41–42, 45–50, in Mancini, Laude, 104; trans. Hughes and Hughes,
no. 16, p. 97.

her outrageous confession of vices, which they placed at the beginning of her
Instructions to set the proper tone. By this means both she and her book are
“annihilated” from the outset. Her Instructions begin with a long, extravagant
discourse that is not actually hers, yet undermines her authority—and author-
ship—with a resounding proclamation that the work is a fraud, filled with dia-
bolical lies. Yet the cognoscenti, who understand true annihilation, will see that
this disclaimer is in fact its very opposite: a sign of the profound humility that
marks its author as an annihilated soul, and therefore an authority on the way to
God. This paradox, as we shall see, is closely paralleled in the work of Marguerite
Porete.
Marguerite Porete: Annihilation and the Paradoxes

of Love and Writing
Fittingly, the author of the Mirror of Simple, Annihilated Souls was very
nearly expunged from the page of history,88 and despite scholars’ best efforts, her
biography remains almost a total blank.89 We have only her book, in its multiple
translations,90 and the inquisitorial records and chronicles leading up to her fiery
88
There is some question about the title Marguerite intended for her book. The Chantilly ver-
sion, the sole complete French text, calls it Le mirouer des simples ames anienties et qui seulement
demourent en vouloir et desir d’amour. Max Huot de Longchamp abridges this in his modern French
title, Le miroir des âmes simples et anéanties (Paris, 1984). The Middle English version has a shorter
title, Þe Myrrour of Simple Souls, followed by Ellen L. Babinsky, trans., The Mirror of Simple Souls
(New York, 1993), and Edmund Colledge, J. C. Marler, and Judith Grant, trans., The Mirror of
Simple Souls (Notre Dame, 1999). See Louisa Muraro, “Le mirouer des simples ames de Margue-
rite Porete: Les avatars d’un titre,” Ons Geestelijk Erf 70 (1996): 3–9. It was not unusual for a
medieval book to be known by multiple titles, sometimes more than one of them authorial. For edi-
tions see Marguerite Porete, Le mirouer des simples ames [anienties], ed. Romana Guarnieri, with a
facing-page edition of the Latin text, Speculum simplicium animarum, ed. Paul Verdeyen, CCCM 69
(Turnhout, 1986). A second Latin version was back-translated from the Middle English by Richard
Methley: Speculum animarum simplicium: A Glossed Latin Version of “The Mirror of Simple Souls”,
ed. John P. H. Clark, 2 vols. (Salzburg, 2010).
89
The best attempt to contextualize her life historically is John Van Engen, “Marguerite (Porete)
of Hainaut and the Medieval Low Countries,” in Marguerite Porete et le “Miroir des simples âmes”:
Perspectives historiques, philosophiques et littéraires, ed. Sean L. Field, Robert E. Lerner, and Sylvain
Piron (Paris, 2013), 25–68. Elizabeth A. R. Brown has recently challenged the now-canonical ascrip-
tion of the Mirror to Marguerite: “Jean Gerson, Marguerite Porete and Romana Guarnieri: The
Evidence Reconsidered,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 108 (2013): 693–734. In response to Brown’s
skepticism, Sean L. Field, Robert E. Lerner, and Sylvain Piron offer a thoroughgoing rebuttal: “A
Return to the Evidence for Marguerite Porete’s Authorship of the Mirror of Simple Souls,” Journal of
Medieval History, forthcoming.
90
“The Mirror of Simple Souls, a Middle English Translation,” ed. Marilyn Doiron, Archivio ital-
iano per la storia della pietà 5 (1968): 241–355; Lo specchio delle anime semplici, trans. Giovanna
Fozzer (Milan, 1994). The latter is an edition of the Middle French text with a facing-page version
in modern Italian. The medieval Italian translation (still poorly studied) appears as an appendix. It
was produced from the Latin and is thus of less authority. On the historical value of the Middle Eng-
lish text see Robert E. Lerner, “New Light on The Mirror of Simple Souls,” Speculum 85/1 (2010):
91–116. Given the proximity of Valenciennes to the Low Countries, with their boundless appetite
for religious literature, there may also have been a Dutch translation. Walter Simons’s evidence is

death. What seems remarkable is that this most vigorous apostle of annihilation
91
was also the most deliberate, self-conscious author. Indeed, it would be no exag-
geration to say that she gave her life for her book—and insured its survival, for
all the zeal of church and state arrayed against her. Unlike Mechthild’s Liber and
Angela’s Memorial, the Mirror alludes to no scribe, confessor, editor, or patron.
No one commissioned it, and so far as we can tell from the text, no one assisted
with its writing. If Marguerite had been less insistent that her heroine, the Free
Soul, was utterly without will and desire, it would be tempting to say that few
medieval books ever sprang so self-evidently from authorial will.
We do not know when Marguerite was born, when or how she began to write,
or how long she wrote and taught openly in Valenciennes before her first brush
with ecclesiastical authority. Nor do we know when her Mirror was first con-
demned, at the instigation of local critics, by the bishop of Cambrai. The bishop
in question, Guido of Collemezzo (r. 1296–1306), was an Italian canon lawyer
appointed by Boniface VIII in the face of local opposition.92 If Marguerite had any
powerful supporters or relatives, they would presumably have had less influence
with such an outsider. In any case, at some point between 1297 and 1305 (the
period when he was resident in his see), Bishop Guido condemned Marguerite’s
“pestiferous book, containing heresies and errors,” to be “burned publicly and
openly at Valenciennes in [her] presence.”93 At the same time he forbade her, on
pain of being condemned as a heretic and relinquished to secular justice, to “com-
pose or possess such a book or use one like it” in the future, or to promote its
ideas verbo vel scripto.94 Curiously, Marguerite was not herself declared a heretic,
excommunicated, or punished at this time, other than being forced to witness the
book burning. This could perhaps indicate that she had important protectors, or
that Guido did not consider her a serious threat, or (unlikely though it seems) that
she expressed repentance.
Nevertheless, she had no intention of obeying the bishop’s order. Most schol-
ars agree that Marguerite took several decisive actions at this point. Far from
suggestive but not conclusive: Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries,
1200–1565 (Philadelphia, 2001), 137.
91
Paul Verdeyen, “Le procès d’inquisition contre Marguerite Porete et Guiard de Cressonessart
(1309–1310),” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 81 (1986): 47–94. The trial documents and chronicles
are newly translated by Sean L. Field in The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor: The Trials of
Marguerite Porete and Guiard of Cressonessart (Notre Dame, 2012), 209–38.
92
Field, The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor, 39–41; Van Engen, “Marguerite (Porete) of
Hainaut,” 61.
93
“Constitit evidenter quemdam composuisse te librum pestiferum contentivum heresum et erro-
rum, ob quam causam fuit dictus liber per bone memorie Guidonem, olim Camaracensem episcopum,
condempnatus et de mandato ipsius in Valencenis in tua combustus presentia publice et patenter”:
Verdeyen, “Procès d’inquisition,” 81–82. The summary is from Marguerite’s sentence by the inquisi-
tor William of Paris (31 May 1310), citing the decree of Bishop Guido, which does not survive: Field,
The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor, 43–45.
94
“A quo episcopo tibi fuit sub pena excommunicationis expresse inhibitum ne de cetero talem
librum componeres vel haberes aut eo vel consimili utereris, addens et expresse ponens dictus epis-
copus in quadam littera suo sigillata sigillo, quod, si de cetero libro utereris predicto vel si ea que
continebantur in eo, verbo vel scripto de cetero attemptares, te condempnabat tamquam hereticam et
relinquebat iustitiandam iustitie seculari”: Verdeyen, “Procès d’inquisition,” 82.

abandoning her condemned book or its ideas, she added an appendix (chapters
123–32) to convey those ideas in a much clearer form, using a first-person voice
rather than the dialogic format she had previously employed. Moreover, she ex-
pressly offered this new, more straightforward material to readers who were still
marriz or “forlorn” (the Latin has maestos seu tristes), while aspiring to attain
the noble freedom of annihilated souls.95 Apparently confident that her book was
not only true, but orthodox, she audaciously circulated copies both to “many
other simple persons—beghards and others,” and to a number of prominent
churchmen.96 As we know from the Latin and Middle English translations, the
Mirror won guarded praise (not formal approbatio) from theologians represent-
ing three different forms of religious life: the locally prominent Franciscan John
of Querayn,97 the Cistercian cantor Dom Franc of Villers, and the famous secular
master Godfrey of Fontaines.98 It is quite possible that she sent yet more copies to
theologians who were not forthcoming with praise. She even risked sending one
to another bishop, John of Châlons-sur-Marne, who was less sympathetic than
she had hoped and may have denounced her to an inquisitor.99
I cite these actions because of what they imply about Marguerite’s social status,
as well as her writing activity. Although her family remains unknown, her sta-
tion must have been relatively high to enable both her confidence and her access
to so many leading churchmen. Several sources refer to her as a beguina. So she
could have spent some time at St. Elizabeth’s, the large court beguinage of Va-
lenciennes, though its fragmentary records do not mention her.100 If she had ever
resided there, she probably left after her troubles began, whether to protect the
residents or to secure her own independence. But many beguines lived on their
own or in small households, and it seems more likely that Marguerite was one of
these.101 Wherever she lived, she must have been a woman of means. This conclu-
sion is urged not only by her literacy, her extensive theological formation, and her
familiarity with courtly discourse, but more materially by the cost of parchment.
95
“Aucuns regars veulx je dire pour les marriz qui demandent la voye au pays de franchise, lesquelx
regars moult de bien me firent ou temps que j’estoie des marriz, et que je vivoie de lait et de papin et
que encore je sotoioie”: Guarnieri, Mirouer, ch. 123, p. 348.
96
“Invenit etiam idem inquisitor quod dicta Margareta dictum librum in suo consimili eosdem
continentem errores post ipsius libri condempnationem reverendo patri domino Johanni, Dei gratia
Cathalaunensi episcopo, communicavit ac necdum dicto domino sed et pluribus aliis personis sim-
plicibus, begardis et aliis, tamquam bonum”: Verdeyen, “Procès d’inquisition,” 78.
97
This friar, whose location is given only in the Middle English text, must have come from a village
in Hainaut, such as Quérénaing, Quaregnon, or Quiévrain. Suzanne [Zan] Kocher, Allegories of Love
in Marguerite Porete’s “Mirror of Simple Souls” (Turnhout, 2008), 22–23; Sylvain Piron, “Margue-
rite, entre les béguines et les maîtres,” in Field, Lerner, and Piron, Marguerite Porete et le “Miroir des
simples âmes”, 89.
98
Sean L. Field, “The Master and Marguerite: Godfrey of Fontaines’ Praise of The Mirror of Simple
Souls,” Journal of Medieval History 35 (2009): 136–49.
99
Field, The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor, 55–57.
100
Bernadette Carpentier, “Le béguinage Sainte-Elisabeth de Valenciennes de sa fondation au
début du XVIème siècle,” Mémoires du Cercle archéologique et historique de Valenciennes 4 (1959):
95–182.
101
Simons, Cities of Ladies, 135; Kocher, Allegories of Love, 37–38; Field, The Beguine, the Angel,
and the Inquisitor, 32–33; Van Engen, “Marguerite (Porete) of Hainaut,” 46–47.

Marie Bertho suggested in 1993 that Marguerite might have earned her living as
a professional scribe, an idea that has much to commend it.102 If she was educated
by nuns, they could easily have taught her to write. Her older contemporary, the
Cistercian Beatrice of Nazareth (d. 1268), was sent to the abbey of La Ramée
expressly to learn the art of writing.103
The absence of any scribal topos in the Mirror is not decisive, for at the outset
Marguerite could either have written with her own hand or paid a secretary, as
many authors did. It is possible too that her teachings were first recorded by
auditors, like Angela’s Instructions, and only later assembled into a book104—al-
though their complex literary form makes that less likely. But once Marguerite’s
book had been “publicly and openly” burned, her situation changed dramati-
cally. Everyone in Valenciennes knew by then that the Mirror was a condemned
and forbidden book. What scribe would have risked his livelihood, if not his life,
by continuing to make copies—especially the large number of copies that Mar-
guerite required? Any such person could have been arrested as a fautor. I believe,
therefore, that she made her own copies, paying for writing materials out of her
private means or with support from family or friends. Strikingly, for all the re-
semblance between Marguerite’s and Angela’s views on annihilation, the beguine
showed no inclination toward radical poverty or asceticism.
Marguerite did acquire a fautor after she was remanded to Paris in inquisitorial
custody. This was Guiard of Cressonessart, a cleric who called himself “the an-
gel of Philadelphia” on the basis of Joachite prophecy. His opinions had little in
common with Marguerite’s, so he presumably defended her out of a shared loath-
ing for inquisitors and ecclesiastical repression.105 I mention him here because of
John van Engen’s intriguing suggestion that he might have translated the Mir-
ror into Latin.106 The date (and thus the authority) of the Speculum simplicium
animarum have been contested. But Justine Trombley has found evidence that it
was completed before 1317, for a manuscript now in Padua includes a vigorous
attack on it, with extensive citations. The author of that polemic, a canon lawyer,
cites numerous legal texts through the 1290s, yet not the anti-beguine decree Ad
nostrum, promulgated in 1317. If the canonist had written after that date, he
would surely have mentioned Ad nostrum, which expressly condemns several of
the errors he attacks. But he could not have been among the canonists consulted
102
Marie Bertho, “Le miroir des âmes simples et anéanties” de Marguerite Porete: Une vie blessée
d’amour (Paris, 1993), 32–34.
103
The Life of Beatrice of Nazareth, 1200–1268, ed. Léonce Reypens, trans. Roger De Ganck (Kal
amazoo, 1991), 1.50, pp. 60–61. No evidence has been found for scriptoria in beguinages: Walter
Simons, “‘Staining the Speech of Things Divine’: The Uses of Literacy in Medieval Beguine Communi-
ties,” in The Voice of Silence: Women’s Literacy in a Men’s Church, ed. Thérèse de Hemptinne and
María Eugenia Góngora (Turnhout, 2004), 105.
104
Cf. Piron, “Adnichilatio,” 30.
105
Robert E. Lerner, “An ‘Angel of Philadelphia’ in the Reign of Philip the Fair: The Case of Guiard
of Cressonessart,” in Order and Innovation in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Joseph R. Strayer,
ed. William C. Jordan, Bruce McNab, and Teofilo F. Ruiz (Princeton, 1976), 343–64, and “Ad-
denda on an Angel,” in Field, Lerner, and Piron, Marguerite Porete et le “Miroir des simples âmes”,
197–213; Field, The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor, 105–24.
106
Van Engen, “Marguerite (Porete) of Hainaut,” 64 n. 134.

by Marguerite’s inquisitor, William of Paris, in 1310, for he was far enough from
the capital to know nothing of her. In fact, presuming a male author, he asserts
that he and his heretical book “deserve to be burned in fire”—unaware that his
wish had already been granted.107 The wide and rapid diffusion of the Speculum,
of which the Padua manuscript represents one instance, shows that Marguerite’s
determined efforts to save her book succeeded, far outpacing the inquisitor’s at-
tempts to annihilate it.108
Whether the Latin text was the work of Guiard or another, it is worth asking
whether Marguerite herself could have commissioned it. The laborious task of
Latinizing a vernacular book, making it accessible to a much larger audience,
would hardly have been undertaken by someone who wanted to suppress the
book. It is even possible that the copies Marguerite sent to the bishop of Châlons
and the three theologians were in Latin. For what it’s worth, the clerics’ endorse-
ments appear in the Latin text, but not the Middle French.109 Further, the early
date of the Speculum is supported by another peculiarity of the Padua manuscript.
Although the canonist dissects the Mirror closely, citing thirty-five passages, he
stops with chapter 117, implying that his copy may have included neither the
systematic account of the Soul’s seven stages (chapter 118) nor the later appen-
dix. Thus an early version of the Speculum may have begun to circulate while
Marguerite was still polishing her French Mirouer.110 Like the nuns of Helfta,
she surely knew that Latin was the language of choice for wide readership and
clerical approval. As Field writes, “there is nothing to show for certain that the
theologians” who condemned propositions from the Mirror even “knew that the
work itself was originally in French.”111 But a Latin text would also have been far
more threatening to clerical opponents, with its implicit claim to be theology and
107
Justine Trombley, “New Evidence on the Origins of the Latin Mirror of Simple Souls from a
Forgotten Paduan Manuscript,” Journal of Medieval History, forthcoming. Trombley first presented
her evidence at the Ninetieth Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, University of
Notre Dame, 14 March 2015.
108
For the success of the French text see Geneviève Hasenohr, “La tradition du Miroir des simples
âmes au XVe siècle: De Marguerite Porete († 1310) à Marguerite de Navarre,” Comptes-rendus des
séances de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres 4 (1999): 1347–66, and “La seconde vie du
Miroir des simples âmes en France: Le livre de la discipline d’amour divine (XVe–XVIIIe s.),” in
Field, Lerner, and Piron, Marguerite Porete et le “Miroir des simples âmes”, 263–317; Zan Kocher,
“The Apothecary’s Mirror of Simple Souls: Circulation and Reception of Marguerite Porete’s Book in
Fifteenth-Century France,” Modern Philology 111/1 (2013): 23–47. Le livre de la discipline d’amour
divine (1470s), partly edited by Hasenohr, contains substantial verbatim extracts from the Mirror.
There are two differing manuscript versions: one in Metz, the other now in Evanston, Northwestern
University Library, MS 117; see Fig. 1. The text was printed at Paris in 1507, 1519, 1537, and 1538.
109
The Middle English gives these endorsements in a slightly more detailed form. A close compari-
son (see Mirouer, 404–9) shows that neither could have been translated from the other. Further, the
endorsements appear as a colophon in the Latin text, but as a headnote in the Middle English. The
French, Latin, and English versions of the Mirror diverge significantly toward the end, suggesting
authorial revisions after both French and Latin texts had begun to circulate.
110
“It . . . seems very likely that by 1310 copies were circulating in both French and Latin”: Kocher,
Allegories of Love, 32.
111
Field, The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor, 128.

not mere devotional writing for the laity. If Marguerite had somehow assumed
112
that Latinizing her book would help to establish its orthodoxy, she miscalculated
badly, giving “Holy Church the Little” more credit, for once, than it deserved.
Be that as it may, the Mirror in its four languages proved highly resistant to
annihilation. If my argument carries conviction, its long-term survival was as-
sured not in spite of, but very much because of its author’s direct actions. So
the paradox could hardly be greater. How could authorship, pursued in a much
stronger sense by Marguerite than by Mechthild or Angela, be possible for an
ame adnientie? If we took Marguerite at her word, we would conclude that it
was God’s will acting through her that created the Mirror, since she herself no
longer possessed a will. But such a reading would carry us beyond the bounds
of historical inquiry. So let us ask instead how the Mirror construes annihilation
and thematizes the problem I have posed. The annihilated soul is a central theme
for Marguerite, as it is not for Mechthild or Angela. In the prologue, Amour ad-
dresses herself to three classes of hearers or readers: actifs et contemplatifs et peut
estre adnientifs.113 The third group (Latin adnichilati) are Marguerite’s ideal read-
ers; they are the only ones who will understand her book, although they no longer
need it. Her goal is rather to help the first two groups, especially contemplatives
who are still slaves to Reason and the Virtues, attain the noble freedom of the
annihilated. Much of the book is given over to praise of the Ame Adnientie (also
called the Ame Enfranchie, or “liberated soul”), dwelling on her exalted status
and perfections. But Marguerite also gives an account of the way a soul acquires
this freedom, undergoing annihilation as she “falls from love into nothingness.”
Before she can arrive at this state, the Soul must undergo three deaths. Dying
to sin, she first lives the life of grace—that is, of ordinary Christians who obey the
commandments and avoid mortal sin. If she wants to proceed further, she must
die to nature and live the life of the spirit—that is, of religious who follow the
counsels of perfection.114 In this state the Soul makes a heroic moral effort, always
doing the opposite of what her will desires and giving the Virtues all that they
demand.115 Only after persevering for some time does she realize that she can, in
fact, never acquit her debt to God.116 By reflecting on her boundless sins, or rather
on God’s knowledge of them, she falls into moral despair, which is paradoxically
her salvation. Despair brings the Soul to a helpless state in which she does not
know what to will and therefore wills nothing at all. This is the annihilation that
brings her peace.117 If a benighted child of Reason were to ask such a Soul how
she is exalted by her very sins, she would reply as follows. In tortured humility,
112
As I have argued elsewhere, a complex literary form, especially in the vernacular, “might protect
even the most audacious theological writings” from prosecution: Barbara Newman, God and the
Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2003), 308. Marguerite seems
to be an exception, but if she was both publicly teaching and circulating the Mirror in Latin, the
exception would be only partial.
113
Guarnieri, Mirouer, ch. 1, p. 10.
114
Ibid., ch. 59, p. 170; ch. 118, pp. 318–20.
115
Ibid., ch. 8, p. 30; ch. 118, pp. 320–22.
116
Ibid., ch. 108–9, pp. 292–98.
117
Ibid., ch. 47, p. 142.

she sees that she is the sum of all evils (la somme de tous maulx) and, in fact, Evil
itself (toute mauvaistié). Her moral poverty is infinite. But justice requires the
greatest alms to be given where there is greatest need, so God—who is Justice—
cannot help but bestow the whole of his goodness on this moral pauper. Thus, by
being the greatest of sinners, she becomes an exemplum of divine mercy to all—
“the salvation of every creature and the glory of God” (le salut mesmes de toute
creature, et la gloire de Dieu).118 Such a Soul has been abismé en humilité (abys-
satam in humilitate)—a phrase reminiscent of Angela.119 In that abyss, she grows
so confused by the knowledge of her own poverty that she becomes drunk with
the reciprocal knowledge of Divine Love. But such a formulation would be too
tame for Marguerite. Rather, she says the Soul becomes “very drunk and more
than drunk from what she never drank nor ever will drink.”120 That is because
her Beloved has drunk of the intoxicating cask for her, and in the transmutation
of love (par muance d’amour), there is no difference between them.
As this account suggests, Marguerite’s concept of annihilation is hard to grasp
because it combines Angela’s penitential logic with a very different notion based
on courtoisie. For Angela, annihilation cannot be separated from the triad of
poverty, suffering, and contempt. In her personal experience it seems to be linked
with her intense, frequent periods of self-loathing and despair. Unlike Margue-
rite, Angela does not progress from “servitude” to “freedom” but continues to
oscillate between illumination and inner darkness, sometimes experiencing both
simultaneously. In the Mirror, on the other hand, the exalted status of the Ame
Adnientie is always linked with joy, peace, freedom, and nobility. Annihilation is
experienced as a breakthrough that occurs once for all; after a Soul has entered
the Land of Freedom, there is no going back. I have suggested elsewhere an anal-
ogy with Martin Luther, on the level not of theology but of experience.121 For
Marguerite, annihilation is like a passage from Law to Grace. A Soul that follows
the counsels of perfection is still marriz, still a serf in bondage to Reason, the
Virtues, and Holy Church the Little. But the annihilated soul is exempt from all
obligations—even to God, who now wills and acts “within her, without her.”122
Given the interchangeable use of adnientie and enfranchie to describe the Free
Soul, it seems likely that Marguerite knew the contemporary legal sense of an-
ienti, “null and void.” For the annihilated soul, all laws have been nullified; she
lives in sovereign freedom.
The other dimension of anientissement derives from the French vernacular tra-
dition of fine amour. From its beginnings, courtly love entailed a vigorous sacrifi-
118
Ibid., ch. 117, pp. 310–12.
119
Ibid., ch. 40, pp. 126–27. Cf. McGinn, “The Abyss of Love,” 110; and Instructio 1, in Thier and
Calufetti, Libro, 404: “humilitas in qua sum inabyssata.”
120
“Et de celle boisson sans ce qu’elle en boyve est l’Ame Adnientie yvre, l’Ame Enfranchie yvre,
l’Ame Obliee yvre, mais tres yvre, mais plus que yvre de ce que oncques ne beut ne ja ne bevra”:
Guarnieri, Mirouer, ch. 23, pp. 86–88.
121
Barbara Newman, Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred (Notre Dame,
2013), 138–39.
122
“Elle ne fera nient, dit Dieu; mais je feray mon oeuvre en elle sans elle”: Guarnieri, Mirouer, ch. 45,
p. 140.

cial strain, which grew more pronounced as the construct grew more rarefied. As
Jean-René Valette points out, as early as Chrétien de Troyes, Lancelot undergoes
something like an annihilation of the will in his obsession with Guenevere:123
His thoughts were of such quality,
no feeling of himself persisted,
he did not know if he existed,
could not remember his own name,
where he was bound, from where he came,
or whether he was armed or not.
Except for one thing, he forgot
all others totally, and all
but her were lost beyond recall.124
This is a fair analogy for the state of an Annihilated Soul. At the further reaches
of fine amour, love could even be defined by the lovers’ mutual self-destruction,
as it famously is in Tristan. In her youth, Marguerite must have been immersed in
the vernacular culture of beguines, which included a flourishing poetry in her na-
tive Picard dialect.125 In the poem Douls Jhesucris, the speaker longs to annihilate
herself for Christ because he has already done so for her:
Amis, amis, amis, amis,
qui pour m’amour si t’anientis,
comment pour ti m’anientirai?126
My love, my love, my love, my love,

who for my love so annihilated yourself,
how shall I annihilate myself for you?
One of several discourses in the Mirror represents the Soul’s relationship with
God as a gift exchange in this context. Just as in Douls Jhesucris the Beloved has
given his whole self, holding nothing back, so the Soul must do likewise. To give
less would mean, at best, to be saved mal courtoisement.127
But even this is not enough for Marguerite. To die the third death, which is the
death of the spirit, the Soul must not only be annihilated in love; she must aban-
don love itself. For as long as anyone loves, she still possesses a will. The sweet
intoxication of love dazzles the Soul so much that she becomes delicate and proud
123
Jean-René Valette, “Marguerite Porete et le discours courtois,” in Field, Lerner, and Piron,
Marguerite Porete et le “Miroir des simples âmes”, 174–75.
124
“Et ses pansers est de tel guise / que lui meïsmes en oblie, / ne set s’il est, ou s’il n’est mie, / ne ne
li manbre de son non, / ne set s’il est armez ou non, / ne set ou va, ne set don vient; / de rien nule ne li
sovient / fors d’une seule, et por celi / a mis les autres en obli”: Chrétien de Troyes, Le chevalier de la
charrette, 714–22, ed. Mario Roques (Paris, 1970), 22–23; trans. Ruth Harwood Cline, Lancelot, or
The Knight of the Cart (Athens, GA, 1990), 20–21.
125
Newman, “Conversion: The Literary Traditions of Marguerite Porete,” in Medieval Crossover,
111–65.
126
Douls Jhesucris, ed. E. Bechmann, “Drei Dits de l’ame aus der Handschrift Ms. Gall. Oct. 28 der
Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 12 (1889): 58–59. The lines
may allude to David’s lament for his son Absalom (2 Sam. 18.33).
127
Guarnieri, Mirouer, ch. 62, p. 180.

(dangereuse), not realizing how much self-love still lurks in the depths of her love
for God.128 Hence she must fall from love into nothingness. This is how Love, the
principal divine speaker in the Mirror, describes such a Soul’s Red Sea crossing:
Her will is ours, for she has fallen from grace into the perfection of the work of the
Virtues, and from the Virtues into Love, and from Love into Nothingness, and from
Nothingness into the Illumining of God. . . . And she is so wholly dissolved into him
that she sees neither herself nor him; and so he in his divine goodness sees himself all
alone. . . . There is no one but he, and so he loves all alone, and sees himself all alone,
and praises himself all alone out of his own being. And this is her goal, for this is the
most noble state of being which the Soul can achieve here below.129
In her autobiographical epilogue, Marguerite famously describes the thought
experiment that led to the annihilation of her will. Imagining various demands
that God could make of her, she willingly consents to the prospects of never hav-
ing existed at all; of dissolving into absolute nonbeing; of undergoing infinite
torments; and of permitting the destruction of the whole universe rather than
acquiescing to sin. Then come the three demands that give her pause, for they
challenge the exclusivity of her love itself. Could she ever consent, the Beloved
asks, “that I could love another more than him, or that he could love another
more than me, or that another could love me more than he did. And there my wits
failed; for I was not able to reply to any of these three cases.”130 Finally, reduced
to despair, she says that if she knew beyond doubt that this were his will, “I would
wish it, and not ever wish anything again. And so, Lord, my will comes to its end
in saying this; and so my will is martyred and my love is martyred.”131 At this, she
says, the Land of Freedom disclosed itself. Love comes to her in person and offers
whatever she could desire—but now, having become nothing, she desires nothing
at all. This parable is the closest Marguerite comes to a concrete depiction of how
it feels to be annihilated. Interestingly, her usage of that term perdured, influenc-
ing enough of her readers—notably Marguerite de Navarre—to have a lasting
128
Ibid., ch. 110, p. 300; ch. 118, pp. 322–24; ch. 131, pp. 386–87. The last passage is clearer in the
Latin: “Diligebam me et habebam me; ideo de facili non poteram respondere. Nisi enim me diligerem,
mea responsio facilis esset et breuis.”
129
“Sa voulenté est nostre, car elle est cheue de grace en parfection de l’oeuvre des Vertuz, et des
Vertuz en Amour, et d’Amour en Nient, et de Nient en Clarifiement de Dieu. . . . Et si est si remise en
luy, que elle ne voit ne elle ne luy; et pource il se voit tout seul, de sa bonté divine. . . . [N]ul n’est fors
que luy, et pource ayme tout seul, et se voit tout seul, et loe tout seul de son estre mesmes. Et ycy point,
car c’est le plus noble estre, que Ame puisse avoir ycy bas”: ibid., ch. 91, pp. 256–58; trans. Colledge,
Marler, and Grant, 116–17, slightly altered.
130
“Et dis en esbahyssement de pensee comment se pouroit il faire que je amasse mieulx aultruy
que luy, et qu’il amast mieulx aultruy que moy, ne que ung aultre m’amast mieulx que luy. Et la je def-
failli; car je ne peu a nulle de ces trois choses respondre”: Guarnieri, Mirouer, ch. 131, p. 384; trans.
Colledge, Marler, and Grant, 167.
131
“Je le vouldroie, sans jamais plus rien vouloir. Et ainsi, sire, ma voulenté prent sa fin en ce dire;
et pource est mon vouloir martir, et mon amour martire”: Guarnieri, Mirouer, 388, trans. Colledge,
Marler, and Grant, 168. See Camille de Villeneuve, “Au-delà de la dette: La dissolution de la relation
d’amour dans le Miroir des simples ames de Marguerite Porete,” in Field, Lerner, and Piron, Margue-
rite Porete et le “Miroir des simples âmes”, 155–67.

Fig. 1. Comment amour est aneantissant, glorifiant et deifiant. From Le livre de la discipline
d’amour divine, chapter 10; Evanston, Northwestern University Library, MS 117, fol. 80v.
See the online edition for a color version of this image. Used with permission.
influence on the French language.132 According to the most comprehensive dic-
tionary, to be annihilated in someone (s’anéantir dans quelqu’un) still means “to
give oneself totally,” while to be annihilated before someone (s’anéantir devant
quelqu’un) means “to renounce one’s personality, efface oneself, humble oneself
completely.”133 The inner experience thus described may lie beyond the ken of
nonannihilated souls—or at any rate, the Mirror says that it does. But we can well
understand that, having undergone such a martyrdom of the will, Marguerite
would not shrink from the martyrdom of her body.
Writing from the other side of that experience, she expresses an unusually tor-
tured relationship to the book for which she gave her life. In her prologue Mar-
guerite evokes an incident from the Roman d’Alexandre by Alexander of Bernai.134
A noble maiden, falling in love with King Alexander sight unseen, has his portrait
painted so that “by means of this image with her other customs (usages), she
dreamed the king himself” (songa le roy mesmes). The image is thus not a perfect
likeness, but an aid to romantic fantasy. In the same way, the Soul is in love with
a distant king, who for his courtesy and largesse is “a noble Alexander,” and in
her love she caused this book to be written (ce livre fist escrire). Yet she also says
that “he gave me this book” (il me donna ce livre), thus compounding the agency.
In either case, the book is a token of the amour loingtaigne so typical of trouba-
dour lyric. Even though it gives the loving maiden some comfort, she still dwells
in a distant land, far from the king’s palace. There follows a remark explicitly as-
cribed to the Author (l’Acteur), the only time this rubric is applied to a speaker—
but it is so garbled that the French, Latin, and English texts all have different
versions. They agree only that the book is written for the benefit of “little ones”
(les petits, paruuli, þe litel), because Love can do all things. Thus the Mirror is a
lover’s portrait that originated as a love gift between the king and the maiden, or
God and the Soul, but it does not exist solely for her sake. It is directed to a less
elite audience that still needs to be enfranchi d’Amour, liberated by Love’s power.
An even trickier account of the book and its purpose appears in chapter 96,
again in the form of a parable.135 Once there was a poor beggarly creature (une
mendiant creature), says the Soul, who sought God in creation and in herself, to
132
For Porete’s influence on the sixteenth-century French princess and woman of letters, see
Hasenohr, “La tradition du Miroir des simples âmes au XVe siècle,” and Carol Thysell, The Pleasure
of Discernment: Marguerite de Navarre as Theologian (Oxford, 2000), 21–24.
133
“S’anéantir,” Le grand Robert de la langue française (Paris, 2007), online.
134
Guarnieri, Mirouer, ch. 1, pp. 10–14.
135
“Une foiz fut une mendiant creature, qui par long temps quist Dieu en creature, pour veoir se
elle luy trouveroit ainsi comme elle le vouloit, et ainsi comme luy mesmes y seroit, se la creature le
laissoit oeuvrer ses divines oeuvres en elle, sams empeschement d’elle; et celle nient n’en trouva, mais
ainçoys demeura affamee de ce qu’elle demendoit. Et quant elle vit, que nient ne trouva, si pensa; et
sa pensee luy dit a elle mesmes, que elle le quist, ainsi comme elle le demandoit, ou fons du noyau de
l’entendement de la purté de sa haulte pensee; et la le ala querir ceste mendiant creature, et se pensa
que elle escriroit Dieu en la maniere qu’elle le vouloit trouver en ses creatures. Et ainsi escripsit ceste
mendiant creature ce que vous oez; et voult que ses proesmes trouvassent Dieu en elle, par escrips
et par paroles. C’est a dire et a entendre, qu’elle vouloit que ses proesmes fussent parfaitement ainsi
comme elle les diviseroit, au moins tous ceulx a qui elle avoit voulenté de ce dire; et en ce faisant, et en
ce disant, et en ce vouloir elle demouroit, ce sachez, mendiant et encombree d’elle mesmes; et pource
mendioit elle, que elle vouloit ce faire”: ibid., ch. 96, pp. 266–68.

see if she could find him as she wished him to be. Finding nothing, she remained
hungry and decided to seek him instead “in the very depths of . . . her exalted
thought.” Then she resolved to write about God as she wished to find him in his
creatures, “and thus this beggarly creature wrote what you hear.” Significantly,
Marguerite admits that she was not yet a Free Soul when she began to write.
Rather, she had conceived her book as a way of seeking God, of “dreaming the
king” as she wished to find him. In other words, she was engaged in a project of
imaginative theology. Unlike other female mystics, she was compelled by no vi-
sion, prophetic call, or command from others. It was her own spiritual quest that
motivated her writing.136 Further, she took upon herself the authority to teach
by an act of will—but also of wishful thinking, for “she wished that her neigh-
bors would find God in her by writing and by words. That is to say, she wished
her neighbors to be perfectly as she would describe them, or at least all those to
whom she wished to say this.” Marguerite implicitly acknowledges a sin of pride:
she had wished to be an exemplar of holiness in order to mold others according
to her will.
Significantly, her confessional paragraph includes seven iterations of the words
vouloir and voulenté. In short, writing the book was not only a willful act, but
actually kept her from attaining her goal. For as long as she persisted in writing
and willing (en ce faisant, et en ce disant, et en ce vouloir), she remained a beggar,
encumbered by herself (mendiant et encombree d’elle mesmes). This is the very
opposite of an Annihilated Soul. Indeed, a character called the Exalted Damsel
of Peace now intervenes to accuse the Soul of writing out of revenge, because she
wished other creatures to go begging as she did!137 The Soul pleads guilty. When
she wrote the book, or “rather when Love made it for me and at my request,” she
was still as foolish as someone who wants to pour the sea into his eye or illumine
the sun with a torch.138 For perfection requires a Soul to “dwell in pure nothing-
ness without thought,” and that is a thing no writer can do. Yet at the end of this
confession, Marguerite insists that although the act of writing encumbered her, it
led her finally to perfection.
In taking leave of her book, the Soul asks the “unknown ladies” of her audi-
ence, that is, the annihilated souls, to forgive her for making it so long. Though
it is very great in words, it will nonetheless appear to them very small. For it was
Cowardice, she admits, who guided her writing, because she allowed Reason
to ask Love so many questions. Thus the book is merely a product of “human
knowledge and human sense,” which can know nothing of love or divine knowl-
edge. In bidding farewell, the Soul makes a final apophatic statement that is again
reminiscent of Angela.
136
Like Augustine in the Confessions: Marguerite seeks God first in creation, then in herself, then in
exalted philosophical speculation (ou fons du noyau de l’entendement de la purté de sa haulte pensee).
The last phrase is exaggerated to the point of self-parody.
137
“Il semble qu’elle se voulsist revenger; c’est assavoir qu’elle vouloit que creatures mendiassent
[en elle], aussi comme elle fist, en autres creatures!”: Guarnieri, Mirouer, ch. 97, p. 270. The Latin
inserts in ea.
138
“Et non pour tant, dit ceste Ame qui escripsit ce livre, j’estoie aussi socte ou temps que je le fis,
mais ainçoys que Amour le fist pour moy et a ma requeste, . . . aussi comme feroit celuy qui vouldroit
la mer en son oeil enclorre, . . . et enluminer le soleil d’un fallot ou d’une torche”: ibid.

My heart is drawn up so high and plunged down so low that I cannot attain to [di-
vine knowledge]. For all that one can say or write about God—or even think about
him, which is more than can be said—is to lie much more than it is to tell the truth.
I have said, says this Soul, that Love caused [this book] to be written through human
knowledge, and through the will to transform my understanding, with which I was
encumbered, as it appears through this book; for Love made it, disencumbering my
spirit. . . . And therefore I say that it is base and very little, however great it seemed to
me at the beginning when I began to make this state known.139
The passage is obscure, and the Latin does not fully agree with the Middle French
text. Marguerite appears, however, to be saying that even if her book is merely
human, writing it helped her in the end to be disencumbered of herself (or of it)
and so transformed—or annihilated. Thus it served a therapeutic purpose: it had
to be written before it could be unwritten, and its author thereby freed from it.
If she were a less slippery writer, we might dismiss Marguerite’s dismissal of
her book as a mere humility topos. But it seems instead to express one pole of an
intense ambivalence, for there follows a poetic leave-taking in which Truth, Holy
Church, and the Holy Trinity all praise the Annihilated Soul. The Trinity calls her
a “dear daughter, my sister and my beloved,” and asks her to tell no more divine
secrets because “others might be damned thereby where you are saved.”140 This
sounds very much as if the Mirror contains dangerous divine knowledge, not
mere human sense. And if Marguerite had been truly convinced that her book
was “base and very little,” would she have died for it? The paradox remains.
Conclusion
Mystical annihilation in the 1290s was an idea whose time had come. Ap-
parently new and shocking, the concept was suddenly everywhere—in the three
women studied here, but also in Ramon Llull, Jacopone da Todi, the anonymous
poet of Douls Jhesucris, and doubtless other vernacular authors. Though it is
tempting to link the idea with a general world-weariness, a mood of fin-de-siècle
or institutional exhaustion, the more decisive factor seems to be the time it took
for theological innovations in Paris to make their way across Europe. Annihilatio,
a nonclassical term, first emerged in scholastic discourse in the 1250s in a variety
of contexts, for example to discuss the divine potentia absoluta,141 the metaphys-
ics of transubstantiation, and the profound humility of Francis and other saints.142
139
“Mon cueur est tiré si hault et avalé si bas, que je n’y puis actaindre; car tout ce que l’en peut
de Dieu dire ne escrire, ne que l’en en peut penser, qui plus est que n’est dire, est assez mieulx mentir
que ce n’est vray dire. J’ay dit, dit ceste Ame, que Amour l’a fait escrire par humaine science, et par le
vouloir de la mutacion de mon entendement, dont j’estoie encombree, comme il appert par ce livre;
car Amour l’a fait, en descombrant mon esperit. . . . Et pource dis je que il est de bas et tres petit, com-
bien que grant il me semblast au commencement de la monstre de cest estre”: ibid., ch. 119, p. 334.
140
“Je vous prie, chere fille, / Ma seur et la moye amye, / Par amour, se vous voulez, / Que vous
ne vueillez plus dire les secrez, / Que vous savez: / Les aultres s’en dampneroient, / La ou vous vous
sauverez”: ibid., ch. 121, p. 340.
141
Piron, “Adnichilatio,” 24–26.
142
Cf. the Dominican Johannes of Magdeburg’s Vita Margaretae Contractae (1260s?), which re-
cords the mystic’s teachings at length. “Istam unionem [divinam] et potestatem et cognitionem nulla

It filtered outward from Paris through masters and preachers who had studied
there, but mystical writers in different regions appropriated the term in varied,
unpredictable ways, assimilating it to their own spirituality. Its core meaning is
the disappearance of a privileged soul into God, that is, the fleeting or lasting
replacement of human subjectivity with divine, though local context gave the
term a specialized valence in each case. By the mid-fourteenth century it had
become commonplace, especially in vernacular mysticism. For Meister Eckhart
it is entwerden, for Ruusbroec vernieuten, for Julian of Norwich noughting, for
Catherine of Genoa anichilatione. While losing its quasi-heretical edge, it remains
a keyword of mystical theologies that posit a radical unity of the soul and God.
There seem finally to be two reasons why the self must disappear or, in the fash-
ionable new argot, be annihilated. One is negative, the other positive, but they
complement each other and ultimately merge. On the negative side, because the
soul was initially created from nothing, a return to that nothingness is the only
way she can atone for her prideful delusion of being Something. Immersed in evils
of every kind, she must do penance by drowning herself in the abyss of humility.
Having by her own wickedness procured the inconceivable self-humbling—in-
deed, the annihilation—of the God-man, she can respond only by imitating him
and committing herself to a lifetime of poverty, suffering, and contempt. In a
different formulation, her beleaguered will is incapable of repaying its infinite
debt to God, so it can escape the treadmill of its endless attempts at virtue only
through despair, abandoning those efforts in a final act of resignation. Then, as in
Buddhism, by stamping out desire the soul puts an end to suffering as well. Her
account can be deleted once and for all, marked “paid in full.”
The positive answer begins from a seemingly opposite starting point. Because
the soul was initially created by love and for love, she can find peace only in the
bliss of a perfect, ecstatic union with the Beloved, unmarred by self-consciousness.
And because she was created in the image of God, her ultimate destiny is to be-
come a partaker of the divine nature (2 Peter 1.4)—to lose herself in her great
Original. She must be transubstantiated, merging into a substance greater than
her own, like a drop of water in a chalice of wine, like a crumb of bread in
the body of Christ. Alternatively, a soul that has received the totality of divine
goodness as a gift from her Lover can respond only by giving herself totally, a
gesture of supreme courtesy that retains nothing for herself and, indeed, nothing
as herself. While the darker, penitential sense of annihilation appears in Angela
of Foligno and the more optimistic sense in Mechthild of Hackeborn, the idea
is marginal to both mystics. But in Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple, An-
nihilated Souls, these two concepts are perfectly fused, making annihilation the
centerpiece of a radical new mysticism, which, despite persecution, had a long
future ahead of it. Paradoxical in every way, annihilation is the soul’s starkest
self-destruction and ultimate achievement; it is both due punishment for sin and
the supreme, beatifying act of grace.
anima habere potest, nisi solum illa, que in nichilum est redacta, et cuius vita est Deus”: Die Vita der
Margareta contracta, einer Magdeburger Rekluse des 13. Jahrhunderts, cap. 67, ed. Paul Gerhard
Schmidt (Leipzig, 1992), 95.

My second question had to do with writing. How can an annihilated soul,
who has vanished into the Godhead where she was before she was created, seek
the permanence of a literary monument? Here our three mystics supply remark-
ably different answers, each testifying to a particular mode of women’s writing
at the cusp of the fourteenth century. For Mechthild, annihilation per se poses
no special problem, for it pertains only to rare moments of ecstasy. But monastic
humility is still an issue: as a humble nun, she is unwilling to glorify herself by
making her revelations public. This problem is resolved through the strategies
of anonymity and collective authorship. We still do not know who wrote much
of the Liber specialis gratiae and most of Gertrud’s Legatus divinae pietatis, for
those nuns chose to remain veiled. Both works, despite their hagiographic com-
ponents, present themselves as fully communal. In the words of Gertrud Jaron
Lewis, they were written “by women, for women, about women,” addressed first
to Helfta and only secondarily—though quite successfully—to the wider world.
Less familiar to scholars today, the Liber reached far more readers in later centu-
ries than either Angela’s book or Marguerite’s. Ironically, only after the publica-
tion of its complete text in 1877 did it fall out of favor. Up to the present day, the
names of Mechthild and Gertrud remain inextricably intertwined. Between 1503
and 1956, prayer books jointly ascribed to them were printed in at least fifty Ger-
man editions,143 not counting Latin texts and other translations. For centuries,
Mechthild’s reputation was the greater of the two—a situation that changed only
in the sixteenth century. (She would no doubt have been pleased by the shift.)
Moreover, the model of literary production forged at Helfta was a durable one.
Scaled-down, vernacular sisterbooks featuring visions and revelations, pious an-
ecdotes, and collective hagiography on the Helfta model became popular in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, though they did not circulate outside their
communities as the Liber did. Such books have survived from nine Dominican
convents and two houses of the Devotio Moderna.144
While Mechthild had qualms about leaving a book in her name, she felt com-
fortable in her role as teacher. With Angela it is the reverse. She cooperated will-
ingly with Brother A.’s writing project by narrating her inner experience. This
was a familiar model of collaboration between holy women and their confessors,
well established by the 1290s, that would continue into the early modern era.
143
These prayerbooks, quite loosely adapted from the Helfta corpus, have such titles as Das buch
geistlicher gnaden, offenbarunge, wunderliches vnde beschawlichen lebens der heiligenn iungfrawen
Mechtildis vnd Gertrudis (Leipzig, 1503); Himmlisches Kleynodt / Das ist: Ein gantz newes Gebett-
Buech / Für das Hochadeliche Frawen-Zimmer (Munich, 1678); and Hoch-nutzliches vnnd trostliches
Tractätlein vom Mundtlichen Gebett (Einsiedeln, 1689). Especially successful was Der zweyer HH.
Schwestern Gertrudis und Mechtildis Gebet-Buch, ed. Martin von Cochem (Cologne, 1689), printed
more than a dozen times under a variety of titles. This was superseded in the nineteenth century by
the Gertruden-Buch oder geistreiches Gebetbuch, größtentheils aus den Offenbarungen der heiligen
Gertrud und Mechtild gezogen, ed. Michael Sintzel (Regensburg, 1842), with many later printings.
144
Lewis, By Women, for Women, about Women; Kurt Ruh, “Die Schwesternbücher der Nie-
derlande,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 126 (1997): 166–73; Anne
Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles: Women Writing about Women and Reform in the Late Middle
Ages (University Park, 2004). The earliest Dominican sisterbook, from Unterlinden, is the only one
in Latin.

But the prospect of teaching spiritual children filled her with dismay. As an an-
nihilated soul who had drowned in the abyss of humility, she could not lay claim
to any wisdom or authority. So if her disciples insisted nonetheless on recording
her Instructions, she had to remind them frequently that she was a “daughter
of pride,” “an evil person,” “filled with darkness and without any truth.” The
litany of vices recorded in Instruction 1 culminates in the confession that all her
teaching—and thus the entire book that follows—is a pack of diabolical lies. This
bizarre captatio benevolentiae, though set in place by a later redactor, faithfully
represents Angela’s dilemma as an extreme case of our paradox. She maintains
her abject humility by proclaiming its opposite: in her own eyes she lacks all
humility, deserves damnation, and “despair[s] of God and his gifts.”145 A hostile
reader could stop there, persuaded that if the speaker’s extravagant confession
of sin were true, at least she did not presume to teach or hold authority over
men (1 Tim. 2.12). Her disciples, on the other hand, might nod sagely and say
to themselves, “Ah, our Angela! How she plumbed the very depths of humility!”
They could then read her Instructions straight through to the epilogue, probably
by Ubertino da Casale, which exchanges this lacerating self-reproach for hagio-
graphic hyperbole. Here Angela is portrayed as truly angelic, indeed as Wisdom
incarnate—a humble woman raised up by God to shame proud, hypocritical men
(1 Cor. 1.26–29).146 Her legacy is thus doubly controlled by her male disciples.
Brother A., writing with no literary ambition, vouches for the authenticity of the
Memorial, while the Instructions offer a more complicated version of Angela. In
them she is a voice of wisdom, an advanced mystical teacher who gains her au-
thority by humbly denying authority to all that she teaches.
Marguerite, who had both the strongest doctrine of annihilation and the keen-
est sense of herself as an author, felt the paradox most sharply. Unlike Angela or
Mechthild, she admits to writing such a long book on her own initiative by an
act of will. Though she also describes the Mirror as Love’s gift to her, its form is
far too literary, too complex and experimental, for her to pretend that she is tran-
scribing divine revelations. In her intense ambivalence, everything she says about
the book is riddled with contradiction. It was written expressly to help les petits
and les marriz, that is, souls who might be capable of annihilation but had not yet
achieved it. Yet she admits that almost all members of her target audience—be-
guines, priests, clerics, and all four orders of friars—“say that I err.”147 Through
the figures of Lady Love and the Free Soul, she roundly condemns Reason and
its votaries in Holy Church the Little, who will never understand the mysteries
of the annihilated soul. Yet she goes to great lengths to seek the endorsement
145
“Et sciatis quod sum posita in una desperatione quam nunquam habui isto modo, quia omnino
desperavi de Deo et de bonis eius . . . quia quidquid mihi Deus concessit et dedit, ad maiorem despera-
tionem et damnationem meam permisit. . . . Et omnia ista sine aliqua humilitate in veritate videbam”:
Instructio 1, in Thier and Calufetti, Libro, 408.
146
This topos, introduced by Hrotsvit and used extensively by Hildegard of Bingen, had a long
history: Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley,
1987), 255–57.
147
“Beguines dient que je erre, / prestres, clers, et prescheurs, / Augustins, et carmes, / et les freres
mineurs, / Pource que j’escri de l’estre / de l’affinee Amour”: Guarnieri, Mirouer, ch. 122, p. 344.

of eminent theologians—and amazingly, obtains it. She admits that the willful-
ness involved in writing kept her “encumbered with herself” and thus hindered
her annihilation. (Since she wrote for the enlightenment of others, however, we
might say in Buddhist terms that she claimed the role of a bodhisattva.148) Yet she
obliquely hints that by completing the book, she did finally become an ame ad-
nientie. She confesses that the Mirror seems to her “base and very little,” despite
the ambitions she had once cherished for it. Yet she steadfastly refused to recant,
continued to copy and distribute the book, and might even have had it translated
into Latin to be read more widely. Few authors, then or now, would be willing to
die for their books as she did. But what legacy should we expect from the woman
whose very name was an oxymoron, a precious pearl (marguerite) yoked to a
worthless leek (porete)?149 By annihilating her will, her life, and for more than
six hundred years, even her memory, she salvaged the book that refused to die.
148
A bodhisattva is a Buddhist saint who deliberately postpones the attainment of nirvana (blissful
annihilation) in order to remain on earth, helping others achieve enlightenment.
149
Van Engen, “Marguerite (Porete) of Hainaut,” 30.
Barbara Newman is Professor of English, Religious Studies, and Classics at Northwestern

University, Evanston, IL (e-mail: bjnewman@northwestern.edu)

Leído. Annihilation and Autorship Three Women Mystics of The 1290s (Barbara Newman)

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Annihilation and Authorship:

Three Women Mystics of the 1290s

Mechthild of Hackeborn: Annihilation, Ecstasy, and Celestial Bliss

Mechthild of Hackeborn (1241–98) enjoyed as traditional and privileged a

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Angela of Foligno: Annihilation, Abjection, and Radical Poverty

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or eucharistic transformation, as in Mechthild, but kenotic Christology.

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In a closely related lauda Jacopone writes:

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Marguerite Porete: Annihilation and the Paradoxes

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My love, my love, my love, my love,

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Barbara Newman is Professor of English, Religious Studies, and Classics at Northwestern

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