By Emily Harris • February 25, 2026 • Share
Marguerite came from the County of Hainaut, in what is now Belgium. She likely was born in the mid-1200s, though exact dates are uncertain. She joined a religious movement known as the Beguines. The Beguines were laywomen who chose lives of prayer and service without taking permanent monastic vows. They lived in communities, supported themselves through work, and focused on spiritual growth.
Their independence made church authorities uneasy. They were not nuns under strict monastic rule, nor were they fully under clerical control. Marguerite went even further than most.
In the late 1200s, she wrote The Mirror of Simple Souls. The book was a mystical dialogue between allegorical figures such as Love, Reason, and the Soul. It described seven stages of spiritual transformation.
At its center was a radical claim. Marguerite argued that a soul could become so united with divine love that it no longer needed the Church’s rituals and rules in the same way. In complete surrender to God, she said, the soul finds true freedom. She wrote that such a soul becomes incapable of sin because it no longer acts from selfish will.
To theologians, this sounded dangerous. It appeared to suggest that moral law no longer applied to certain people. To Marguerite, it described the deepest possible union with God.
She did not write in Latin, the language of clergy and scholars. She wrote in Old French. Ordinary people could read it. That made her ideas harder to contain.
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