considered oath to obey her until the age of thirty quashed. Though Marguerite by no
means lacked in courage or ability (e.g., she successfully preserved order in Damietta in
Egypt in 1250 at a particularly difficult moment in her husband’s first crusade), Louis
almost always ignored her political advice.
After the king’s death in 1270, Marguerite became a more active political figure. She
was particularly exigent—to the point of raising troops—in defending her rights in
Provence, where her husband’s brother, Charles of Anjou, maintained his political
authority and control of property after his wife’s (her sister’s) death, contrary to the
intentions of the old count, who had died in 1245. Philip III had his hands full in
restraining her. Only his death in 1285 and Charles of Anjou’s in the same year resolved
the situation. At the behest of the new king, Philip IV, she accepted an assignment of
income from Anjou as compensation for recognizing the preeminent rights of Charles of
Anjou’s heirs in Provence. Her last years were spent in doing pious work, including
founding in 1289 the Franciscan nunnery of Lourcines, which eventually became a focal
point of the cult of her late husband, Louis. Although she does not seem to have testified
for her husband’s canonization, Marguerite was active in the propagation of his memory:
her confessor, Guillaume de SaintPathus, for example, wrote an important and reverential
biography of the king. Marguerite died on December 30, 1295, nearly two years before
the process of canonization was completed.
William Chester Jordan
[See also: LOUIS IX]
Le mariage de saint Louis a Sens en 1234. Sens: Musées de Sens, 1984.
Sivéry, Gérard. Marguerite de Provence: une reine au temps des cathédrales. Paris: Fayard, 1987.
MARGUERITE PORETE
(d. 1310). Biographical information about Marguerite Porete comes from inquisitorial
documents, which tell us that she was a béguine from Hainaut. Quite possibly, she was a
solitary itinerant who expounded her teachings to interested listeners. She wrote the
Mirouer des simples ames anienties in Old French sometime between 1296 and 1306.
Since there is no indication that someone else wrote the text of the Mirouer from the
author’s dictation, we can surmise that the author wrote the treatise herself and that she
was well educated.
The text received approvals from three orthodox church leaders, one of whom was
Godfrey of Fontaines, a scholastic at Paris between 1285 and 1306, who also counseled
the author to use caution in her expressions. Approval was not universal, however, and
the text was condemned and burned in the author’s presence with the orders not to spread
her views under threat of being turned over to the secular authorities. Marguerite was
arrested at the end of 1308 and remained in prison for a year and a half before being
condemned to the flames as a relapsed heretic. Despite the condemnation, the Mirouer
apparently enjoyed widespread popularity, for in addition to copies made of the text in
Old French it was translated into Middle English, Italian, and Latin.
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1112