Congratulations to Dr Justine Trombley who has won an Andrew W. Mellon Post-doctoral Fellowship at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, receiving one of four fellowships offered annually by the Institute. Justine graduated from St Andrews in 2015 with her PhD project entitled ‘The Mirror Broken Anew: The Manuscript Evidence for Opposition to Marguerite Porete’s Latin Mirror of Simple Souls in the Later Middle Ages.’ She will hold this postdoc from September 2016 – June 2017, during which time she will be working on turning her doctoral thesis into a book. 
She will be researching the attempted suppression of the early fourteenth-century heretical work ‘The Mirror of Simple Souls’, which was condemned in Paris in 1310, and it’s author, Marguerite Porete, who was burned at the stake for circulating it. Despite this, the ‘Mirror’ continued to circulate anonymously after it was condemned and was translated out of Old French into Latin, Middle English, and Italian. Justine’s work focuses on the fact that, though its vernacular versions had on the whole a very positive reception in late medieval Europe, codicological evidence shows that the Latin version of the ‘Mirror’ continued to encounter opposition and re-condemnation by opponents who had no knowledge of its authorship or its history, showing an ambivalent reception of the ‘Mirror’, rather than one which was strictly ‘heretical’ or ‘orthodox’. Her time at Toronto will involve continued examination of the codicological evidence, as well as adding broader context to the manuscripts by investigating religious controversies in Northern Italy and southern Germany in the 14th and 15th centuries, and investigating the larger theme of textual repression and censorship in late medieval manuscript culture. She will also be starting to prepare a critical edition of a newly re-discovered text which refutes thirty-five errors from a Latin ‘Mirror’.