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In 1310, a woman named Marguerite Porete was taken to a stake in the center of Paris. A crowd watched as she was condemned as a heretic. She was burned after she refused to submit or take back her words. Her crime was writing a book. Marguerite Porete came from the County of Hainaut, in what is now Belgium. No one knows her exact birth year, but it is usually placed in the mid 1200s. Very little about her early life is certain. She joined the Beguines. They were women who chose a spiritual life without the usual monastic vows. They often lived in small communities and supported themselves through work. The Beguines lived with a level of independence. Many served the poor, prayed together, and tried to draw closer to God outside strict church structures. To some church leaders, women doing this without direct clerical control could feel threatening. Marguerite took that freedom further than most. Sometime in the late 1200s, she wrote a mystical book called The Mirror of Simple Souls. It is written as a conversation between allegorical figures, Love, Reason, and the Soul. It describes seven stages of spiritual change. At the center of the book is a bold idea. A soul, she says, can become so united with divine love that it no longer needs the Church’s rituals, rules, or intermediaries in the same way. In the highest union, the soul gives up its own will to God completely, and in that surrender, it finds perfect freedom. "Love is God," she wrote, "and God is Love." She did not write in Latin, the language of the clergy and scholars. She wrote in Old French, the language ordinary people could understand. That meant her ideas could travel beyond monasteries and beyond the usual channels of control. And they did. Between 1296 and 1306, the Bishop of Cambrai condemned her book as heretical. He ordered it burned publicly in the marketplace of Valenciennes. He also ordered Marguerite never to share it again. She refused. Marguerite believed her book carried divine truth. She said she had consulted respected theologians before sharing it, including the Master of Theology Godfrey of Fontaines. Whatever support she believed she had, she would not let one bishop silence her.