Marguerite Porete was burned at the stake in Paris on June 1, 1310, for refusing to retract The Mirror of Simple Souls, a dialogue in which the soul passes through seven states to annihilation in God, beyond the virtues and the Church's mediation. The book circulated anonymously in French, Latin, Italian, and English for centuries; scholarship reconnected it to Porete only in 1946 through Romana Guarnieri's identification. The trial record survives in the Archives Nationales, Paris.
The Church classified Porete with the Brethren of the Free Spirit, a loose target more than an organized sect; historians still debate whether such a movement existed or was an inquisitorial construct. The Mirror's claim that the annihilated soul 'takes leave of the virtues' was exactly the sentence the fire was for.
Porete's radicalism is linguistic: the soul's final state cannot be spoken in the language of will, virtue, or church, so the book is written as a dialogue whose purpose is to exhaust its own speakers. It is the via negativa pushed until the negative itself dissolves.
If the soul that no longer wills is free, what is left to save?