The history of the Church and Christianity is permeated by the phenomenon of heresy and the efforts of those in power or who believed themselves to possess the "absolute truth" to crush any form of dissent or heterodox thought. In this way , heresy, a term that etymologically means simply "choice," became synonymous with "error," but also with rebellion and dissent against authority.
In this ancient and never-ending struggle between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, between old and new, between different poles that, instead of mutually enriching each other, entered into dramatic conflict , many women have distinguished themselves . Prophetesses, mystics, false saints, witches, reformers, and freethinkers: these are the heretics who have shaken established balances, faced enormous obstacles, and often paid dearly for the courage of their choices. Condemned, persecuted, silenced, their stories have long been overlooked, while the history of heresy was told primarily through male figures.
Historian and theologian Adriana Valerio fills this void in her book Eretiche (Il Mulino, 2026, 168 pp., also available as an e-book), in which she restores heresy to its original meaning as a conscious choice. She does so by giving voice to the lives of extraordinary women: from the Montanists to Marguerite Porete, Joan of Arc and Marta Fiascaris, to the protagonists of the Anti-Council of 1869 and the modernists.
Sadly forgotten women are brought back to life through Adriana Valerio's story, which brings to the forefront these remarkable figures and religious practices surprisingly ahead of their time.
The experience of the Beguines was exemplary in this regard. The Beguines emerged in the thirteenth century, bringing a breath of fresh air to medieval Christianity. They were women who consecrated themselves to God and lived in community, but without entering a monastery or convent and without belonging to any religious order. They chose to live a life of prayer in the service of those in need, but also to prioritize their individual freedom over belonging to the Church. They were often young and rebellious girls from wealthy bourgeois and aristocratic families, who had absorbed the cultural climate of courtly love—a climate that exalted feminine virtues, slightly undermining the widespread notion of the total superiority of men—and who, for this reason, sought to maintain their freedom from any male figure (be it a husband, a father, a brother, or a clergyman).
The Beguines thus created a mysticism based not so much on a bond with the Church—with which they did not seek a break—but on union with Christ's message, to be lived in complete freedom. Their movement enjoyed resounding success in the thirteenth century, especially in present-day Belgium and Germany, where approximately two hundred thousand women lived in beguinages. This very success alarmed Church institutions: the movement was condemned by the Council of Vienna in 1311, and many Beguines were forced to join the Franciscan tertiary order to continue their experience of community life and prayer. Those who refused to bow their heads met a grim end, as happened to one of the figures remembered by Adriana Valerio in her book. On June 1, 1310, in Paris, Marguerite Porete, a Beguine of aristocratic origins from Hainaut or Valenciennes, was burned at the stake for refusing to recant the contents of her book, The Mirror of Simple Souls.
The book's central theme concerned the soul's liberation, achieved through seven degrees of asceticism, culminating in absolute perfection, the reintegration of the creature into the Creator. It was, evidently, an ascetic proposal addressed to exceptional souls, not to all believers. The author distinguished two Churches: the great Church, composed of simple souls, annihilated in God, and the small Church, formed by the ecclesiastical hierarchies. Positioning herself not against, but above, the latter, Marguerite Porete did not ask that perfect souls replace the hierarchical Church, but rather that the latter open itself in the form of recognition and acceptance of those great souls who have an absolutely free relationship with God. This conception rendered the existence of the Church entirely superfluous for them, and inevitably could not help but be condemned and labeled heretical by the hierarchies. For Margaret, religious perfection was liberation from all earthly and human bonds: “The soul has no care for anything; it has no honor, it has no shame; it has no poverty, it has no riches; it has no joy, it has no sadness; it has no love, it has no hate; it has no hell, it has no heaven.”
Marguerite Porete, like other saintly women who lived between the 14th and 15th centuries, contributed to the processes of internalization and spiritualization of religiosity—which would later take hold in the modern age, prompting the Church to take repressive action—but also to the largely successful attempt to appropriate female sanctity by resolving situations of marginalization, tension, and instability. In short, much of today's religious sentiment is due to women like Marguerite Porete: women, like Marguerite, determined to fight, learn, preach, and minister in the name of an inclusive and borderless Church.