medieval worlds • no. 7 • 2018VERGING ON THE POLEMICAL: EXPLORING THE BOUNDARIES OF MEDIEVAL RELIGIOUS POLEMIC ACROSS GENRES AND RESEARCH CULTURES
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BANK AUSTRIA CREDITANSTALT, WIEN (IBAN AT04 1100 0006 2280 0100, BIC BKAUATWW), DEUTSCHE BANK MÜNCHEN (IBAN DE16 7007 0024 0238 8270 00, BIC DEUTDEDBMUC)
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medieval worlds • no. 7 • 2018, pp. 137-152, 2018/06/29
VERGING ON THE POLEMICAL: EXPLORING THE BOUNDARIES OF MEDIEVAL RELIGIOUS POLEMIC ACROSS GENRES AND RESEARCH CULTURES
This article examines the style and rhetoric of a fourteenth-century treatise written against the condemned mystical work The Mirror of Simple Souls. The treatise addresses thirty-five extracts from the Mirror which are refuted as errors. Rather than merely a list of erroneous propositions, the text is a polemical narrative which employs various genres and literary styles from the canon of anti-heretical writings. The article notes how these various genres are combined to produce a comprehensive condemnation of the Mirror, and examines the rhetoric used to address it. The text is shown to go beyond merely refuting the Mirror’s doctrine. It also personifies the text by connecting it to the broader concept of heresy through the use of standard tropes that are usually used to describe the person of the generalised »heretic«. This makes it unique in the history of the Mirror’s reception, and shows how an anonymous text was assessed and characterised with tactics more often applied to human agents, rather than texts.
Keywords: polemic; anti-heretical texts; Marguerite Porete; The Mirror of Simple Souls; heresy; condemned texts; textual refutation