Trigger warning for references to rape.
Life for medieval women in Western Europe was supposed to follow a few paths. Women were expected to become wives and mothers, or perhaps take religious vows. Aline Kiner’s The Mirror of Simple Souls shows us one of the few alternate paths for women in the 1300s: beguinage. Neither wives nor nuns, beguines had some freedom to become merchants or scholars or healers. Kiner’s book—elegantly translated from the French by Susan Emanuel—takes us inside the Great Beguinage of Paris in the first decades of the fourteenth century.
Ysabel, an elderly woman who joined the beguines after the death of her second husband, is a kindly, pious healer. She is our touchpoint throughout The Mirror of Simple Souls even as the narrative shifts to include the stories of a young teenage bride fleeing a monstrous husband, a conflicted beguine who doesn’t know where her loyalties lay, and a Franciscan monk who becomes fascinated with the mystical work that gives this novel its name. The beginning of this book is marked by violence. An early scene depicts the execution of a woman we later learn is the author of the historical Mirror of Simple Souls, Marguerite Porete. Characters reference the tortures and executions of members of the Knights Templar, whose order was officially dissolved in 1312. And there is Maheut, the battered girl Ysabel takes in during the first chapters. Maheut bears physical and psychological marks of violence inflicted by the man she was forced to marry. The security of the beguinage is one of the few places of real safety in a tumultuous Paris.
Kiner allows her plots to meander through the years. As characters let their stories unspool, we also see petty politics in the Great Beguinage, theological debates, jealousies, budding romance, and much more. I had to force myself to stop trying to guess where the narrative would take me; this book defies a lot of plot conventions. Once I stopped trying to anticipate where the story would go next, I had time to take a look around me, so to speak. There is so much detail in this book about medieval medicine, the education of women, and even the complicated process of translation in an age when there was no standard French language waiting to be soaked up. Kiner poured so much of what she knew into this book that I feel like I just took a particularly engaging history course.
The Mirror of Simple Souls is a slow read. Readers will need to be patient as characters slowly reveal their backstories and motivations. It also helps if readers are familiar with medieval Western Europe or take a minute to do some reading on Wikipedia; there are a lot of real historical figures, places, groups, and concepts dropped into the text of this book. But, thankfully, there’s no exam at the end of The Mirror of Simple Souls.
* This page is in French. I wasn’t able to find an English-language Wikipedia entry about the Couvent de l’Ave Maria. There are some travel websites and academic writing about the Great Beguinage of Paris for those who are interested.