Old Compilation / New Compilation
John of Morigny's Liber florum celestis doctrine survives in two major authorial redactions, referred to in the scholarship as the Old Compilation and the New Compilation.
Internal textual evidence — successive strata visible across the prayers and the Book of Visions — shows the Old Compilation had already been revised at least once even before the 1315 condemnation (Fanger, Rewriting Magic, p.118): John was a habitual reviser of his own work well before institutional pressure forced a more drastic rewrite. The New Compilation proper, however, is a direct and urgent response to that 1315 condemnation of the original Book of Figures by unnamed "Barking Dogs" (canon lawyers) who judged its figures too close to necromantic diagrams. Because the condemned Old Book of Figures had already circulated to a community of operators, John could not simply recall it; instead he composed, "in great haste," a new installment offering an alternative model for the same ritual and spiritual process, leaning more heavily than before on direct visionary authorization from the Virgin (Rewriting Magic, p.2–3).
Of the twenty-three manuscripts known to Fanger as of her 2015 count, the great majority preserve the New Compilation: eighteen contain all or substantial portions of it, against just one manuscript preserving the Old Compilation, plus four further manuscripts that are prayer-collections drawing unattributed sequences from the work (Rewriting Magic, p.xi). This lopsided survival is itself informative — whatever readership the Liber florum found across its two centuries of circulation, it found overwhelmingly through the New, post-condemnation version of the text, not the version John first wrote.
The New Compilation's own Book of Figures (NC III.i) explicitly describes the 1315 attack, makes specific corrections to the Old Book of Figures, and outlines a simplified Second Procedure for using the figures with the prayers (per the Liber florum's own structural reference table, Rewriting Magic, p.xv).
Literature
- Fanger, Claire. Rewriting Magic. Penn State University Press, 2015.
- Fanger, Claire, and Nicholas Watson, eds. John of Morigny, Liber florum celestis doctrine. PIMS, 2015.
Sources
- Fanger, Claire, Rewriting Magic: An Exegesis of the Visionary Autobiography of a Fourteenth-Century French Monk (2015), p.xi, p.2-3, p.118 — Manuscript census; revision strata; 1315 rewrite.
Literature
- Fanger, Claire. Rewriting Magic. Penn State University Press, 2015.