The historiography of erasure: how John lost his own book
The argument, precisely
Fanger traces a specific chain of textual transmission-by-paraphrase running from the 1323 Grandes Chroniques de France notice of John's condemnation through several intermediate retellings to Henry Charles Lea's 1887 A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, arguing that each step did not merely compress the story but actively degraded its accuracy — culminating in an account that no longer credits John as the author of his own book at all.
Against what
A naive reading of historiographical transmission might assume that later, thinner references to an obscure medieval figure are simply less detailed versions of an underlying stable fact-set. Fanger's traced chain shows the opposite: each retelling introduces new distortion, and the errors compound rather than average out.
Evidence
The 1323 Grandes Chroniques notice, while judged by Fanger "inaccurate, if not unfair" on some points (e.g., its claim the book promised worldly riches), does at least correctly distinguish John's own book from the ars notoria tradition it draws on (Rewriting Magic, p.3). Guillaume de Nangis's chronicle entry compresses this further. A sixteenth-century antiquarian history of Paris (Antiquitez... de Paris, per the plan's own research notes) then falsely credits the unnamed monk with having invented the ars notoria itself — collapsing the crucial distinction the 1323 notice had preserved. Lea's 1887 Inquisition history, drawing on this degraded chain, removes John as an identifiable author altogether (Rewriting Magic, p.20–22).
Reception
This chain is presented in Fanger's own preface/introduction as the historiographical backdrop against which the 1987–1990s manuscript rediscoveries (Dupèbe, Barnay, Kieckhefer, Watson, Fanger) should be understood — not as filling in a few missing details, but as recovering an author who had been genuinely lost from view through compounding misattribution.
Literature
- Fanger, Claire. Rewriting Magic. Penn State University Press, 2015, p.3, p.20–22.
Sources
- Fanger, Claire, Rewriting Magic: An Exegesis of the Visionary Autobiography of a Fourteenth-Century French Monk (2015), p.3, p.20-22 — Erasure chain: chronicle to Lea 1887.
Literature
- Fanger, Claire. Rewriting Magic. Penn State University Press, 2015.