MORIGNY

Liber Florum Celestis Doctrine — a monastic life & practice simulator

John of Morigny was a real man: a Benedictine of the abbey of Morigny near Étampes, a priest, a canon lawyer trained at Orléans, and after 1308 his house's provost. He was also, for years, a practitioner of forbidden arts — first a necromantic book he copied from a cleric, then the ars notoria, which promised the whole of human learning to anyone who could keep its prayers and fasts. He came to believe the art had been contaminated by demons. He did not stop. He rewrote it, as the Liber florum celestis doctrine, and claimed the Virgin herself had authorized the rewriting.

In 1323 a chronicle records that a monk of Morigny's book was condemned and burned at Paris. It survived anyway, in copies, in houses he never saw. This is a simulation of that life, built on Claire Fanger's scholarship and answerable to it: every line of writing carries a source and a status — attested, adapted, or invented — and the game will show you which.

Play

current

v3 — the reading-forward redesign

Begins in childhood: Chartres at thirteen, the schools, the first forbidden book. A day is ten decisions and a great deal of reading, spanning 1301 to the fire in 1323. Teach your sister to read by the slow road or the fast one; write your visions into a book that remembers its own errors; and find out what the book becomes.

archived

v2 — the full campaign

The recitation-grammar era, kept exactly as it shipped: the monastic day verse by verse, the Struggle, discernment of spirits, the scriptorium, and 1323 through to the stemma of witnesses.

archived

v1 — the original prototype

The first playable slice, for the record: one day, one night, one sought vision.

The four voices

Every moment the game stops and waits for you, it owes you four things. This is checked mechanically — a branch that fails to orient, voice, ground, or instruct fails the build.

The narrator

Third person, modern, analytical. Explains the monastic and magical world and expects no prior knowledge.

John's hand

His own words, in the idiom of his century — never clinical, never modern, whatever the narrator just said plainly.

The pencil hand

The designer-scholar: what is attested, what we invented, and where the uncertainty sits.

The ledger

What the machine actually did. It never discloses a silent failure — that honesty lives at the reckoning.

What is simulated

Address — seven rungs from natural operation to pact, and you do not always land where you aimed

Legitimacy — suspicion tracks how recognisable an act was, not how wicked

The Liber florum — a book you write, which keeps its errors visible and glossed

Bridget — his sister, taught to read by the art or the slow road, with her own arc and her own power

Discernment — corruption is paid in unreliable visions, not in points

The house — seven factions holding seven positions at once, including an ascetic who thinks you are not pure enough

Transmission — the score is not what he kept but what got out, and how corrupt it was when it did

1323 — always arrives. There is no winning; there is only what survives him

44audited branches

31works cited

19scholar briefs

20test suites

The research behind it

Citations are machine-checked. Every source a line of writing claims must resolve to a registry that records what kind of claim it is — a primary text, modern scholarship, standard period practice not yet pinned to a page, or our own design reasoning. Summaries of scholarship are finding aids and may never be cited as authorities.

Claire Fanger, Rewriting Magic — the canonical interpretive source, and the model for the pencil hand
Fanger & Watson, the critical edition of the Liber florum
Sophie Page, Magic in the Cloister — the monastery as a production environment for magic
Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages — the "clerical underworld," credited on first use
Julien Véronèse on the ars notoria; Michael Bailey on boundary-work; Edward Peters on accusation documents
…and fourteen more, each with a brief in the repository

A correction worth naming. This project spent months simulating John's central struggle as sexual temptation, citing Fanger for it. On reading her argument carefully, that is close to the opposite of what she documents: the desire for forbidden knowledge is the temptation, and John asks God for comprehensive knowledge precisely so that he may resist sin. The system was retargeted, the citation was corrected in place rather than quietly replaced, and a research pipeline now makes such claims checkable. The account is kept in the repository.

Also in this project

source

The repository

Engine, content, tests, and the whole documentary apparatus: the scholar briefs, the design decision log, the loop synthesis, the research pipeline, and the branch-audit method.

in progress

The knowledge portal

A browsable version of the research shelf — the nineteen scholar briefs, the works registry with what each source grounds, and the open questions still marked verify. Currently readable in the repository under docs/.

in progress

Playthrough logs

Each run already records itself in every voice — the game calls it the Book of Visions, and you can read a day back at any reckoning. Publishing those as permanent, editable pages, with a reader's own emendations shown as their own hand, is the next piece of work.