Images for Deification: Visual Literacy in Marguerite Porete Mirror of Simple Souls

This chapter aims to show how Le Mirouer des Simples Ames, a theological treatise by the heretic beguine Marguerite Porete (†1310), constructs visual images to teach a specific set of doctrines to a public not necessarily clerical or educated. We should start from the fact that this book has no iconography in the traditional sense of the term, but the written text needs and claims ‘interior visualization techniques’ for its correct use. We will restore the perceptive historical context in which this book and its images were used and we will discuss the historical reception of the Mirouer as a didactic device. In the first place, we will focus on analysing the ambiguous concept of ‘image.’ In the second place, we will show how Marguerite incarnates doctrines into images by analysing a concrete example. This will allow us to understand the position of the discourse facing its doctrinal-expressive tradition and to extract its ‘difference.’