Commemoration of the first burnt "beguine", Marguerite Porete († 1.6.1310)

Since its establishment in 2009, the Meister Eckhart Research Unit at the Max-Weber-Kolleg of the University of Erfurt has not only studied the writings of Meister Eckhart, but also the writings of the beguine and mystic Marguerite Porete, which were very popular at the time and linked to Meister Eckhart's themes. In 2010, to commemorate the 700th anniversary of Marguerite's death, a scientific symposium "Rencontre à Paris 1310" was held on 10 June at the Heinrich Heine House in Paris, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), which brought together Marguerite, Meister Eckhart, Dante and Lullus as vernacular literary pacemakers. The symposium was organised by the Meister Eckhart Society (Dietmar Mieth) in collaboration with the Sorbonne, where it was supported by the Philosophy historian Ruedi Imbach. (The results of the symposium were published in 2017 in "Meister Eckhart: Texts and Studies").

Marguerite's main connection with Meister Eckhart, her contemporary (*c. 1260), is the formula of "sans pourquoi" or "âne warumbe" ("without why"), which she also summarises in the formula "not knowing, not having, not wanting". Marguerite writes: "God is so great that she (the soul) is unable to grasp anything about him. And because of this nothingness, it has reached the certainty of not knowing and not wanting." (Ch. 81) It cannot be ruled out that Marguerite and Eckhart met in Paris – before 1294 or after 1301.

Queens (such as Philippa of England or Marguerite of Navarre) read and honoured Porete's popular book Mirror of Simple Souls. Marguerite did for the (French) religious vernacular – in her own fundamental way – what Dante did for the Italian language, Lullus for the Spanish language and Eckhart for the German language.

The Meister Eckhart Research Unit together with the Meister Eckhart Gesellschaft has committed itself to honouring Marguerite, this important European and successful French literary woman, at the site of her heresy trial and death in the centre of Paris. These efforts have been successful: a square in the centre of Paris, in the 4th arr., will be named and inaugurated after Marguerite Porete on 10 June 2025, at 10:30 am, by Laurence Patrice, Adjointe à la Maire de Paris, and Anne Hidalgo, the Maire de Paris Centre, making her "officially part of the nomenclature of Paris".

In addition to the naming of the square and the scientific contributions, the efforts to honour Marguerite were also expressed in the form of a historical novel: Dietmar Mieth, Ketzerflammen in Paris, Hannover, Verlag der Blaue Reiter, 2nd ed. 2025.