Timeline
Dated events in John of Morigny's life and the transmission, condemnation, and rediscovery of his book.
John studies canon law at Orléans; ars notoria experiments
As a young, already-professed monk, John pursues advanced study at the University of Orléans — one of only two university subjects (with Paris theology) open to a monk. It is almost certainly here, not at Chartres as Fanger's own earlier work once suggested, that he first experiments with the ars notoria and, by his own later confession, with necromancy (nigromancia) too.
Vision 8: a first, incomplete rejection
Before the decisive Vision 9, John's Book of Visions records an earlier vision (Vision 8) in which God expresses unambiguous prohibition of the ars notoria. John's own conversion is not sudden: he records that he "put it away from me somewhat, but not entirely" (Rewriting Magic, p.66, Fanger quoting the Book of Visions directly) — a false start Fanger reads as evidence the text is a genuine confessio, not a smoothed hagiographic narrative.
The decisive vision: John turns from the ars notoria
A sequence of visions — including a penitential vision of Christ recorded in the Book of Visions — convinces John his ars notoria practice was demonically contaminated. The two witnesses he names, Bridget (Burgeta) and John of Fontainejean, testify to related experiences at roughly this period. This is the pivot from ars notoria practitioner to author of a purified replacement: the germ of the Liber florum.
Old Compilation composed and circulated
John writes the first full version of the Liber florum celestis doctrine — the Old Compilation — in installments, and circulates it to a growing community of ritual operators. Internal textual strata show he had already revised it at least once even before external condemnation forced the more drastic 1315 rewrite.
1315: The "Barking Dogs" condemn the Book of Figures
Unnamed canon lawyers — John's own term for them, never explained further — condemn his original Book of Figures as too closely resembling necromantic diagrams. This is a real, distinct condemnation eight years before the famous 1323 Paris burning, and the direct cause of the New Compilation: John cannot recall the already-circulating condemned text, so instead rewrites the ritual and spiritual process it describes.
New Compilation written in haste
In direct, urgent response to the 1315 condemnation, John composes a rewritten Book of Figures — and, with it, a revised Book of Visions describing the attack itself — leaning more heavily on direct visionary authorization from the Virgin than the Old Compilation had. This New Compilation becomes the version that dominates the manuscript record: 18 of 23 known manuscripts preserve all or substantial portions of it, against just one for the Old Compilation.
1323: The Liber florum burned at Paris
The Grandes Chroniques de France records, for this year, the condemnation of an unnamed "monk of Morigny" for compiling a book of Marian images promising all knowledge and worldly reward — judged "false and evil... condemned to be burned and put on the fire." For over six centuries this chronicle notice was the only trace of John of Morigny available to any reader; the Liber florum itself had vanished from view.
Post-1323: continued manuscript transmission
Despite the Paris burning, the Liber florum continued to be copied and used among literate monks for roughly two centuries — evidence Fanger reads as directly challenging the assumption that a public book-burning constitutes effective censorship. See Book condemnation is not effective censorship.
Guillaume de Nangis's chronicle compresses the 1323 account
The continuation of Guillaume de Nangis's Latin chronicle — a distinct textual witness from the vernacular Grandes Chroniques de France — retells the 1323 condemnation in compressed form, the first step in the centuries-long chain of paraphrase that Fanger traces from a roughly accurate original notice toward the near-total erasure of John's authorship. See the Grandes Chroniques 1323 notice for the fuller original account, and The historiography of erasure for the whole chain.
The long silence: John vanishes from view
Following the last known manuscript copying activity, John of Morigny effectively disappears from scholarship for roughly four centuries, known — if at all — only through a chain of increasingly garbled paraphrases of the 1323 chronicle notice: a 16th-century Parisian antiquarian history that falsely credits him with inventing the ars notoria, then Henry Charles Lea's 1887 history of the Inquisition, which strips him of authorship of his own book entirely.
A 16th-century Parisian antiquarian history inverts the record
A sixteenth-century antiquarian history of Paris (cited in Fanger's own historiographical account as Antiquitez... de Paris) takes the erasure a step further than Nangis's compression: it falsely credits the unnamed "monk of Morigny" with having invented the ars notoria itself, collapsing the distinction between John's own book and the older tradition he drew on and rewrote — a distinction the original 1323 Grandes Chroniques notice had actually preserved.
1887: Henry Charles Lea erases John as author
Henry Charles Lea's A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages (1887), drawing on the already-degraded chain of paraphrase running from the Grandes Chroniques through Nangis's compression to the 16th-century Antiquitez... de Paris, removes John as an identifiable author of the condemned book altogether — the low point of the historiography of erasure, and the last major secondary reference to the case before Jean Dupèbe's 1987 manuscript notice began the modern recovery.
1987: Jean Dupèbe notices a Munich manuscript
Jean Dupèbe's 1987 notice of a Munich manuscript is the first modern scholarly flag that a text by John of Morigny actually survives, independent of the chronicle paraphrase chain — the opening move in the rediscovery that would culminate in the 1990s.
1990s: the Kieckhefer–Watson–Fanger rediscovery
Building on Dupèbe's notice and Sylvie Barnay's own pioneering work (credited by Fanger as foundational, though not independently detailed as a figure entry in this Phase 1 build), Richard Kieckhefer, Nicholas Watson, and Claire Fanger together drive the modern rediscovery and identification of the Liber florum across the 1990s — the beginning of the field that now exists around John of Morigny.
1998: Nicholas Watson's essay announces the rediscovery to the field
Nicholas Watson's essay "John the Monk's Book of Visions of the Blessed and Undefiled Virgin Mary, Mother of God: Two Anonymous Reworkings, and Oswald de Corda," published in Claire Fanger's edited volume Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic (Penn State University Press, 1998), is the essay that first announces the modern manuscript rediscovery to the field of medieval-magic scholarship — the earliest point at which John of Morigny's own text, rather than the degraded chronicle-paraphrase chain, becomes available for study again. The essay itself was not available on this portal's machine and is cited here only from Fanger's own back-matter cross-references in Rewriting Magic, not independently read.
2001: Fanger and Watson publish the Liber Visionum prologue
Claire Fanger and Nicholas Watson publish "The Prologue to John of Morigny's Liber Visionum: Text and Translation" in Esoterica 3 (2001) — the first substantial English-language scholarship on the text. This article is also the origin of two claims Fanger's own 2015 preface to Rewriting Magic later retracts as manuscript-reading errors: the location of John's ars notoria experiments at Chartres (corrected to Orléans) and the location of the 1315 "Barking Dogs" condemnation at Sens (retracted as unlocatable on present textual evidence) — a documented instance of the field's understanding self-correcting on further manuscript work, not a single fixed picture.
2015: the Fanger–Watson critical edition and Rewriting Magic
Claire Fanger and Nicholas Watson publish the first critical edition of the Liber florum celestis doctrine (PIMS), and Fanger publishes Rewriting Magic (Penn State), her own monograph-length study — together the modern foundation this portal itself draws on most directly.