Ars Notoria
The ars notoria is a ritual system for obtaining infused divine knowledge of the liberal arts, philosophy, and theology — not through study, but through a program of prayer, fasting, and the contemplation of geometric diagrams called notae, each inscribed with prayers and lists of angelic names (Véronèse, in Fanger, ed., Invoking Angels, p.44). It survives, per Véronèse's count, in more than fifty manuscripts scattered across western European and North American libraries — a manuscript base he explicitly reads as evidence that ritual magic "was not a marginal element in the cultural world of the literate elite" (Invoking Angels, p.41).
Textual Structure
Every complete text of the notory art contains two core elements: the Flores aurei ("Golden Flowers") and the Ars nova ("New Art"). Manuscripts fall into two textual stages: an older, thirteenth-century (or possibly late twelfth-century) base version giving the ritual's large structure without enough operational detail for a postulant lacking a master to actually perform it; and a later, heavily glossed version from the late thirteenth century onward, in which a substantial marginal commentary — in the manuscript Véronèse uses as his reference text, BnF Latin 9336, the gloss makes up as much as 43–57% of the whole content depending on how the figure-texts themselves are counted — supplies the operational instructions the base text lacks (Invoking Angels, p.42–43). This BnF Latin 9336 manuscript is the same 13th-century French manuscript from which this portal's sibling project, MORIGNYGAME, has sourced an image ("the first figure of grammar") — a direct point of contact between this portal's scholarship and that project's art direction.
The Founding Myth
The art's own prologue narrates its origin: God gave humankind, at creation, a natural aptitude for knowledge; the ars notoria does nothing but improve on that God-given faculty, and so cannot work against the divine plan. It was first delivered to Adam, and later to Solomon, who received the tabulae aureae — golden tables inscribed with the angelic names and prayers constituting the art — from the hands of the angel Pamphilius, "the principal minister of God." A second authority, Apollonius ("the philosopher"), is credited as the art's great disseminator among later practitioners (Invoking Angels, p.43). This Adam-then-Solomon transmission myth recurs, with variations, throughout the treatise's glossed commentary.
Condemnation and Persistence
The ars notoria was condemned by name by Alexander of Hales, Thomas Aquinas, and other scholastic doctors of the Church (Invoking Angels, p.41). Véronèse poses the genuinely open historiographical question of what its wide, sustained manuscript survival despite this condemnation actually means: either the condemnation was simply ineffective against a practice already too embedded in clerical literate culture, or — the reading he leans toward, by comparison with the more clearly demonic and more actively suppressed practice of "nigromancy" — its persistence reflects a real and sustained institutional ambivalence about its actual status, since (following Aquinas's own hesitation) its objective nature was genuinely more ambiguous than necromancy's (Invoking Angels, p.41). See Book condemnation is not effective censorship for the closely related argument Fanger makes about the Liber florum's own post-condemnation survival.
John of Morigny's Relation to It
John practiced the ars notoria as a young monk, almost certainly at Orléans, before a sequence of visions convinced him it was demonically contaminated (see John of Morigny, and The decisive vision: John turns from the ars notoria for the decisive episode). His response was not abandonment but rewriting: the Liber florum celestis doctrine is explicitly structured to imitate the ars notoria's own shape — prayers, figures, a promise of infused knowledge — while claiming its authorization directly from the Virgin Mary rather than from Solomon and Pamphilius, and while explicitly invoking the Augustinian trope of "plunder[ing]" the old art's own "sacred and divine words... as the Hebrews plundered the Egyptian treasure" (Fanger, Rewriting Magic, p.2; see "Plundering the Egyptian Treasure"). Fanger has published a structural comparison of John's Liber visionum against the ars notoria treatise tradition, cited by Véronèse but not independently read for this portal (Invoking Angels, p.43–44, citing Fanger's article).
Literature
- Véronèse, Julien. "Magic, Theurgy, and Spirituality in the Medieval Ritual of the Ars notoria." Trans. Claire Fanger. In Fanger, ed., Invoking Angels. Penn State University Press, 2012, ch. 1.
- Véronèse, Julien. L'Ars notoria au Moyen Âge: Introduction et édition critique. Florence: SISMEL, 2007. [cited by Véronèse's own essay; not independently read for this portal]
- Fanger, Claire. Rewriting Magic. Penn State University Press, 2015.
Sources
- Fanger, Claire, Rewriting Magic: An Exegesis of the Visionary Autobiography of a Fourteenth-Century French Monk (2015), p.2 — John's practice of it; plundering trope.
- Fanger, Claire (ed.), Invoking Angels: Theurgic Ideas and Practices, Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries (2012), p.41-44 — Structure, founding myth, condemnation, manuscript count.
Literature
- Véronèse, Julien, in Fanger, ed., Invoking Angels. Penn State University Press, 2012.