La influencia del Espejo de las almas simples de Margarita Porete en la Vita Nuova y La Divina Comedia de Dante Alighieri

In my opinion, the parallels that arise between Dante and Porete should be sought before anything else in the expressive means that both used, as well as in some of the main characteristics of the mystical language that both share. We already know that The Mirror of the Simple Souls alternates prose and verses, and in the Vita Nuova there are alternately 31 lyrical poems and 42 chapters in prose; what is more, both were written in a romance language, The Mirror in medieval French, La Divina Comedia and the Vta Nuova in the Tuscan dialect, the base of present-day Italian. We know too that The Mirror is a mystical work inasmuch as the mystic, by definition, designates a kind of experience that wants to reach the greatest degree of union of the human soul with the Sacred during the earthly life. Dante is in a certain way also a mystical poet, something that María Zambrano confirms for us in her two essays Dante espejo humano and El Infierno (Dante). Setting out from the famous pilgrimage, Zambrano offers us a reading in a symbolic key of the works of Dante that, according to her, wanted to transmit to us a mystical experience disguising it in the forms of the language of love. The language that leads towards this experience is a specific mystical language characterised by some peculiarities that we find both in Dante Alighieri and Margarita Porete.