Madame Guyon

Madame Guyon, born Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon, was a French mystic, spiritual writer and lay teacher of prayer who lived from 1648 to 1717. Her writings on inward prayer, abandonment to God and pure love, especially the Moyen court et tres facile de faire oraison and her biblical commentaries, circulated widely in manuscript and print and became one of the central subjects of the late seventeenth century Quietist controversy in France; they influenced Francois Fenelon, archbishop of Cambrai, but drew the opposition of Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, Louis Antoine de Noailles and other French ecclesiastical authorities. She was never formally condemned as a heretic by name, but her writings and teachings stood behind the Articles of Issy in 1695, and her Moyen court was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1689; she was imprisoned several times, including in the Bastille, and spent her later years at Blois. Although her teaching remained suspect in Catholic France, her writings were widely read in Protestant circles, especially among Pietists, Quakers, Methodists, Holiness writers and other traditions of inward religion, and her spirituality belonged to a wider transnational literature of interior prayer that included earlier Spanish and New Spanish contemplatives such as the hermit Gregorio Lopez.