Concepts
"Barking Dogs"
John of Morigny's own term for the unnamed condemners who, in 1315, judged his original Book of Figures too closely resembled necromantic diagrams — a condemnation distinct from and eight years earlier than the famous 1323 Paris burning. They "must have had professional knowledge of canon law," per Fanger, but are never further identified in the text. Fanger's own earlier scholarship placed them at Sens; her 2015 preface explicitly retracts this as a manuscript-reading error — the location "cannot now be nailed to textual evidence."
"Plundering the Egyptian Treasure"
The biblical-exegetical trope John of Morigny explicitly invokes to justify his own project: taking the ars notoria's "sacred and divine words" and repurposing them for the Liber florum, "as the Hebrews plundered the Egyptian treasure" — an allusion to Exodus 12:35–36, developed by Augustine as a justification for Christians extracting true or useful material from pagan learning. For John, it licenses rewriting a condemned ritual art rather than discarding it wholesale, and frames his whole project as recovery and purification rather than invention.
Ars Notoria
A ritual system, attested in over fifty manuscripts across western Europe by Véronèse's count, promising infused knowledge of the liberal arts, philosophy, and theology through prayer and the contemplation of geometric figures (notae) inscribed with angelic names and prayers. Its own founding myth holds the art was revealed by God to Adam, then to Solomon via the angel Pamphilius, inscribed on golden tables (tabulae aureae). Condemned by name by Thomas Aquinas and other scholastic authorities, yet never effectively suppressed — Véronèse reads its persistence as evidence of genuine institutional ambivalence about its status, not merely failed policing. John of Morigny practiced it as a young monk at Orléans before rewriting it as the Liber florum.
Notae
The geometric figures at the heart of both the ars notoria and John of Morigny's own Liber florum: diagrams inscribed with prayers and angelic names, meant to be contemplated (not merely read) as part of the ritual's operation. In the ars notoria tradition, texts inserted into the notae could run to roughly a quarter of a full treatise's content by Véronèse's count. John's own Book of Figures — condemned once in 1315 and rewritten as part of the New Compilation — is built around a parallel set of figures whose fidelity to the correct geometric form was held to determine the efficacy of the whole operation.
Old Compilation / New Compilation
John of Morigny's two major redactions of his own book. The Old Compilation was itself already revised at least once before 1315; the New Compilation was written in direct, urgent response to the 1315 condemnation of the original Book of Figures by unnamed "Barking Dogs," offering an alternative ritual and spiritual process rather than simply defending the old one. Of the twenty-three known manuscripts (as of Fanger's 2015 count), only one preserves the Old Compilation; eighteen preserve all or substantial portions of the New.