Unbound, Unnameable: Desire and Dissolution in Marguerite Porete’s Mirror “Love has no why,and the soul who loves has no need to ask.She is unbound. She neither wills nor does not will,for she is held, wholly,in the embrace of Love’s will.”— Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of

Silence Speaks: Gender, Nature, and Identity in a 13th-Century Romance In the Roman de Silence, written in Old French by Heldris of Cornwall, we meet Silence—a child born female but raised as a boy to circumvent a royal decree forbidding women from inheriting. As the