The John of Morigny Portal

John of Morigny

HIGH MONK · fl. c. 1290s–1320s (no firm birth or death year established in the sources this portal has read)

John of Morigny was a fourteenth-century Benedictine monk attached to the Abbey of Morigny, near Étampes in northern France. He was a priest and a highly educated one: he held an advanced degree in canon law from the University of Orléans, and his surviving writing shows deep familiarity with the literature, liturgy, exegesis, and theology of the later Middle Ages (Fanger, Rewriting Magic, p.1). No firm birth or death year is established in the sources read for this portal; John is known almost entirely through the one book he left behind, and through the record of its condemnation.

Fanger's 2015 preface to Rewriting Magic corrects her own earlier published guess (a location at Chartres) about where John's ars notoria experiments took place: the evidence now points to Orléans, where he was sent to earn his canon-law degree, and where — as a professed monk — canon law and theology were the only two university subjects open to him (theology being reserved to Paris). Orléans put him within reach of the university book trade and, per Kieckhefer's phrase adopted across the field, its "clerical underworld" of student necromancy (Rewriting Magic, p.x–xi). Fanger and Watson also newly identify Otrouiacum, named in the Book of Visions as the location of John's mother's house, as Autruy-sur-Juine — a village on the Roman road between Morigny and Orléans, roughly midway between the two (Rewriting Magic, p.xi).

The Ars Notoria Period and the Turn Away

John's own Book of Visions confesses to experimentation with both nigromancia (necromancy, or black magic) and the ars notoria, a widely used and widely condemned ritual system promising infused knowledge of the liberal arts, philosophy, and theology through prayer and the contemplation of geometric figures (notae) (Rewriting Magic, p.2). His conversion away from the practice was neither sudden nor total. After a vision (vision 8) in which God expressed unambiguous prohibition, John himself records that he "put it away from me somewhat, but not entirely" (Rewriting Magic, p.66, quoting the Book of Visions) — a moment Fanger reads as evidence the text is a genuine confessio, not a hagiographic conversion narrative smoothed of its false starts.

The vision that did finally and thoroughly turn him is vision 9, among the strangest episodes in the whole text. Troubled by disturbing visions and seeking to understand them, John recites a prayer from his old ars notoria book "which is said for memory, as the custom is." That night he dreams of driving off a malign spirit with a sword, then being approached by a tall man in ash-colored robes who asks John to hear his confession. The man confesses to having "dispensed mercy where I should have dispensed justice" and demands absolution; when John tries the ordinary words of absolution, the man refuses them — "open your mouth and I will fill it" — and John finds himself speaking words identifying the penitent as Christ himself (Rex regum, princeps principum et dominus dominancium — "king of kings, prince of princes, lord of lords"). John writes: "And then I understood, I knew without doubt, and I had proven by experience, that the book of the ars notoria was entirely malign" (Rewriting Magic, p.68–69, quoting Book of Visions). From this point, per his own account, he abandoned the ars notoria entirely, confessed, and began the work that became the Liber florum.

Two Condemnations, and the Rewriting

The Liber florum's composition was broken in the middle by two separate condemnations, eight years apart — a fact Fanger and Watson's own edition work uncovered and that earlier scholarship (built only on the famous 1323 burning) had missed entirely.

In 1315, unnamed "Barking Dogs" — John's own term, apparently canon lawyers, never further identified — condemned his original Book of Figures, whose diagrams too closely resembled necromantic figures to their eyes. The book had already circulated to a community of operators; John could not simply recall it. Instead he composed a new installment: a rewritten Book of Figures offering an alternative ritual and spiritual process, leaning more heavily than before on direct visionary authorization from the Virgin (Rewriting Magic, p.2–3). This is the origin of the New Compilation — not a leisurely revision, but an urgent response to institutional attack, written, in Fanger's words, "in great haste." Internal evidence (successive strata visible in the prayers and the Book of Visions) shows the Old Compilation had itself already been revised at least once before 1315 (Rewriting Magic, p.118) — John was a compulsive reviser even before the condemnations forced his hand.

The second and more famous condemnation came in 1323: an entry in the Grandes Chroniques de France records the burning at Paris of a book by an unnamed "monk of Morigny" who had sought to "inspire and renew a condemned heresy and sorcery called in Latin ars notoria" — a work described as securing all branches of knowledge, and "any riches, honours or pleasures one wanted to have," through figures contemplated with fasting and prayer and the invocation of "little known names" believed to be demons' names (Rewriting Magic, p.3). Fanger notes the description is in several ways unfair to the actual text — the Liber florum is explicitly not concerned with worldly riches or pleasures — but it does at least distinguish John's book from the ars notoria itself, a distinction later paraphrases would lose entirely (see The historiography of erasure: how John lost his own book).

Rewriting as Devotion, Not Retraction

What John does after each condemnation is the single most important fact about him as a historical actor: he does not stop. He does not recant the underlying claim that ritual access to divine knowledge is licit when properly authorized. He rewrites — producing a purified system explicitly modeled on the shape of the ars notoria he had practiced, but claiming its authorization directly from the Virgin Mary rather than from the older art's own textual tradition, and using a biblical trope from Augustine to justify plundering the old art's "sacred and divine words" for the new book, "as the Hebrews plundered the Egyptian treasure" (Rewriting Magic, p.2; see "Plundering the Egyptian Treasure"). The finished Liber florum celestis doctrine breaks into three parts — the Book of Visions (autobiography and apologia), the Book of Prayers (the ritual liturgy proper), and the Book of Figures (further visions and the diagrams themselves) — see Liber florum celestis doctrine for the full structure.

Transmission and Survival

Contrary to the intuitive assumption that a public burning ends a text's life, the Liber florum did not stop circulating in 1323. Fanger argues that evidence of its continued transmission and ritual use among literate monks after 1323 — likely spread in part through Benedictine travel between houses — "challenges the widespread belief that book condemnation constitutes effective censorship" (Rewriting Magic, p.21–22; see Book condemnation is not effective censorship). As of Fanger's 2015 count, twenty-three manuscripts contain all or part of John's work: one preserves the Old Compilation, eighteen contain all or substantial portions of the New Compilation, and four are prayer-collections drawing unattributed sequences from it (Rewriting Magic, p.xi).

Rediscovery

The Liber florum then effectively vanished from scholarship for over six centuries, known only through steadily degrading paraphrases of the 1323 chronicle notice (see The historiography of erasure: how John lost his own book), until a convergence of independent rediscoveries in the early 1990s: Sylvie Barnay in France, and Nicholas Watson together with Claire Fanger in Canada, each independently located manuscripts containing the full New Compilation text (Rewriting Magic, p.21). Watson and Fanger's subsequent collaboration produced the first English-language scholarship on the text and, in 2015, the critical Latin edition (Fanger & Watson, Liber florum celestis doctrine, PIMS) that underlies most of what is now known about John.

Literature

ars-notoria, monastic-magic, visionary-autobiography, condemnation, rewriting

Sources

Literature

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