Book condemnation is not effective censorship
The argument, precisely
Fanger argues that the historical record of the Liber florum celestis doctrine's manuscript transmission — the great majority of surviving copies dating from after the 1323 Paris condemnation and burning — is direct evidence against a common historiographical assumption: that a recorded public book-burning effectively ended a text's circulation and use.
Against what
The assumption under challenge is widespread enough that it usually goes unstated: when a chronicle records a book burned as heretical or dangerous, historians have tended to treat the text's practical history as over at that point, its condemnation and its disappearance from use treated as more or less the same event.
Evidence
Of the twenty-three manuscripts of the Liber florum known to Fanger as of her 2015 count, eighteen preserve all or substantial portions of the New Compilation — the version John completed years before 1323, meaning its post-1323 copies represent genuine continued transmission, not merely survivals predating the burning. Fanger attributes this ongoing circulation most plausibly to travel between Benedictine houses, the same institutional network that had originally connected John's own community to its wider monastic world (Rewriting Magic, p.21–22).
Reception
This argument is presented within Fanger's own monograph as a framing claim for why the Liber florum's history matters beyond antiquarian interest in one obscure monk — it is offered as a caution applicable to how historians read condemnation notices generally, not only in John's specific case. This portal has not independently verified how the wider field has taken up or contested this specific framing beyond Fanger's own book.
Literature
- Fanger, Claire. Rewriting Magic. Penn State University Press, 2015, p.21–22.
Sources
- Fanger, Claire, Rewriting Magic: An Exegesis of the Visionary Autobiography of a Fourteenth-Century French Monk (2015), p.21-22 — Direct quotation of the censorship claim.
Literature
- Fanger, Claire. Rewriting Magic. Penn State University Press, 2015.