Liber florum celestis doctrine
The Liber florum celestis doctrine ("Book/Flowers of Heavenly Teaching") is the one extant work through which modern scholarship has access to John of Morigny. Fanger describes it as "a complicated and polyvalent work that John wrote in installments and circulated to an expanding audience of ritual operators over many years" (Rewriting Magic, p.1). Until recently there were no printed editions; the text remained effectively unknown and inaccessible from the early sixteenth century until its rediscovery in the early 1990s.
Structure
The finished work breaks into three principal parts, per its own internal structure (reproduced in Fanger, Rewriting Magic, p.xiv–xvi):
- I. Book of Visions — a visionary autobiography and apologia: a General Prologue, a Prologue to the Book of Visions, an account of visions induced by the ars notoria (I.i), good visions received after John laid the ars notoria aside (I.ii), the testimony of two named witnesses against the ars notoria — Bridget/Burgeta and John of Fontainejean (I.iii) — and preparations for the Book of Prayers (I.iv), including an exhortation on right intention and criteria for distinguishing true from false visions of Mary.
- II. Book of Prayers — a lengthy liturgy addressed to God and the angels for the infusion of divine and curricular knowledge, structured as Seven Prayers (an Acquisitional opus, requesting permission to proceed) followed by Thirty Prayers organized into further opera — Auxiliative, Preparative, General Executive, Special Executive for the liberal arts, for philosophy, and for theology, and a concluding thanksgiving — culminating in the First Procedure, a ritual manual for using the prayers.
- III. Book of Figures — further visions and a set of notae designed to work with and enhance the ritual process (the operations of which are sometimes called the "Second Procedure"), including, in some manuscript traditions, a "Third Procedure" involving a consecrated ring.
Content and Claims
In the Book of Visions, John confesses to earlier experimentation with both necromancy and the ars notoria; his own Book of Prayers is explicitly structured to imitate the shape of the art he came to regard as demonically contaminated (Rewriting Magic, p.2). The whole work simultaneously records the process of its own composition under the guidance of the Virgin Mary — its prayers, visualizations, and figures are designed to enable the same kind of visionary communication with Mary, Christ, and the angels that John records himself experiencing.
Condemnation and Rewriting
Composition was interrupted twice: a 1315 condemnation of the original Book of Figures by unnamed "Barking Dogs" (see "Barking Dogs"), and the far more famous 1323 burning at Paris recorded in the Grandes Chroniques de France (see 1323: The Liber florum burned at Paris). The first produced the New Compilation (see Old Compilation / New Compilation); John's response to the second is not detailed in the sources read for this portal.
Manuscript Survival
As of Fanger's 2015 count, twenty-three manuscripts contain all or part of the work: one with the Old Compilation, eighteen with all or substantial portions of the New Compilation, and four prayer-collections drawing unattributed sequences from it (Rewriting Magic, p.xi). Fanger argues this post-1323 survival directly challenges the assumption that public book-burning constitutes effective censorship (see Book condemnation is not effective censorship).
Literature
- Fanger, Claire, and Nicholas Watson, eds. John of Morigny, Liber florum celestis doctrine. PIMS, 2015.
- 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.1, p.xiv-xvi — Overview; structural table.
Literature
- Fanger, Claire. Rewriting Magic. Penn State University Press, 2015.