Claire Fanger
Claire Fanger teaches in the Department of Religion at Rice University (Rewriting Magic, p.234, back-matter biography). She is, by a wide margin, the central figure in the modern recovery and study of John of Morigny: her Rewriting Magic (2015) is the first and to date only monograph devoted to him, and she is co-editor, with Nicholas Watson, of the critical Latin edition of his Liber florum celestis doctrine (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2015) — the edition on which nearly all detailed factual claims about John ultimately rest.
Discovery and Two Decades of Work
Fanger dates her own engagement with John to "twenty years" of "reading and rereading his words" by the time of Rewriting Magic's writing (Rewriting Magic, p.xii — the preface's closing acknowledgment to John himself). The rediscovery of a complete New Compilation manuscript was one of three independent finds converging in the early 1990s: Sylvie Barnay's in France, and Fanger's own, made together with Nicholas Watson in Canada (Rewriting Magic, p.21). One version of the origin story that Fanger herself relates: Richard Kieckhefer recalled the Grandes Chroniques entry describing the 1323 burning of a Marian-imaged work resembling the ars notoria, which set in motion the identification process that led to Watson calling Fanger — "I was the last person Nicholas called" — as the discovery of a matching manuscript was confirmed (Rewriting Magic, p.37–39).
Method
Rewriting Magic's preface and introduction are explicit that Fanger considers John a "strong and hardly disinterested collaborator" in the project of representing his own thought — a reflexive, first-person scholarly method in which the historian's own process of coming to understand the subject is narrated alongside the historical argument itself (Rewriting Magic, p.xii–xiii). This method is the direct model this portal's own "pencil hand" / apparatus conventions (in the sibling MORIGNYGAME project) are built on — use the method, not the person, per that project's own house rule.
Other Work and Institutional Role
Fanger is also editor of Invoking Angels: Theurgic Ideas and Practices, Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries (Penn State UP, 2012), a collection in which she contributes both the introduction and a chapter directly on John, "Covenant and the Divine Name: Revisiting the Liber iuratus and John of Morigny's Liber florum" (p.192), and of Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic (Penn State UP, 1998), which contains Nicholas Watson's essay first announcing the modern rediscovery of John's text to the field (per Rewriting Magic's back-matter and cross-references; the Conjuring Spirits volume itself was not available to this portal's author — see the Rewriting Magic entry in Scholarship for what could be directly verified). She has acknowledged intellectual debts to Sylvie Barnay (credited as "the pioneer in this territory"), and to Frank Klaassen, Benedek Láng, Sophie Page, and Julien Véronèse as ongoing points of reference (Rewriting Magic, p.xi).
Literature
- Fanger, Claire. Rewriting Magic. Penn State University Press, 2015.
- Fanger, Claire, ed. Invoking Angels: Theurgic Ideas and Practices, Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries. Penn State University Press, 2012.
- Fanger, Claire, ed. Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic. Penn State University Press, 1998. [not directly read for this portal]
Sources
- Fanger, Claire, Rewriting Magic: An Exegesis of the Visionary Autobiography of a Fourteenth-Century French Monk (2015), p.234 — Rice University affiliation.
Literature
- Fanger, Claire. Rewriting Magic. Penn State University Press, 2015.