Pierre Poiret, Editor of Madame Guyon’s Justifications

François Trémolières

Abstract

Pierre Poiret (1646-1719) was a tireless editor of many mystical texts, including those of his contemporaries. Particularly noteworthy are the Complete Works of Madame Guyon (1648-1717), which he collected in thirty-nine volumes, some of which appeared after his death: this is the case of the Justifications (three volumes, 1720), the dossier of authorities that Madame Guyon had assembled in her defense at the time of the Quietism quarrel. This article aims to compare this edition with the manuscript (the copy addressed to Bossuet, kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France). Poiret turns out to be scrupulously faithful to it, forced to make some modifications, including significant ones, but always in service of the original. He includes almost the entire manuscript, transforming it by the mere fact of organizing it into an anthology of the common “mystical doctrine” (as Poiret puts it in his Preface).
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