Rewriting Magic: An Exegesis of the Visionary Autobiography of a Fourteenth-Century French Monk By Claire Fanger

In Rewriting Magic, Claire Fanger explores a fourteenth-century text called The Flowers of Heavenly Teaching. Written by a Benedictine monk named John of Morigny, the work all but disappeared from the historical record, and it is only now coming to light again in multiple versions and copies. While John’s book largely comprises an extended set of prayers for gaining knowledge, The Flowers of Heavenly Teaching is unusual among prayer books of its time because it includes a visionary autobiography with intimate information about the book’s inspiration and composition. Through the window of this record, we witness how John reconstructs and reconsecrates a condemned liturgy for knowledge acquisition: the ars notoria of Solomon. John’s work was the subject of intense criticism and public scandal, and his book was burned as heretical in 1323. The trauma of these experiences left its imprint on the book, but in unexpected and sometimes baffling ways. Fanger decodes this imprint even as she relays the narrative of how she learned to understand it. In engaging prose, she explores the twin processes of knowledge acquisition in John’s visionary autobiography and her own work of discovery as she reconstructed the background to his extraordinary book. Fanger’s approach to her subject exemplifies innovative historical inquiry, research, and methodology. Part theology, part historical anthropology, part biblio-memoir, Rewriting Magic relates a story that will have deep implications for the study of medieval life, monasticism, prayer, magic, and religion. Claire Fanger is Assistant Professor of Religion at Rice University. She is the editor of Invoking Angels: Theurgic Ideas and Practices, Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries (Penn State, 2012) and Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic (Penn State, 1998). introduction:lost and found knowledge[A]sk yourself whether our language is complete;—whether it was so before the symbol- ism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods.—Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations“We’ve got to start by finding a ruined city of giants,” said Jill. “Aslan said so.”“Got to start by finding it, have we?” answered Puddleglum. “Not allowed to start bylooking for it, I suppose?”—C. S. Lewis, The Silver ChairJohn of Morigny, the man whose work is the principal target of my investiga- tion here, was a fourteenth-century Benedictine attached to the Abbey of Morigny near Étampes. He was highly educated, a monk and priest with an advanced degree in canon law from the University of Orléans, whose writing reflects deep acquaintance with the most important literature, poetry, art, and theology of the later Middle Ages. The extant book through which we princi- pally have access to him, the Liber florum celestis doctrine or Flowers of Heav- enly Teaching, is a complicated and polyvalent work that John wrote in installments and circulated to an expanding audience of ritual operators over many years. Until very recently there have been no printed editions of this text, which is one reason it has remained unknown and inaccessible since the early sixteenth century. Over the past two decades, I have been one of the pri- mary vectors for transmission of information about John’s Liber florum, so when I write that “we” have access to John through this work, the pronoun2 rewriting magicincludes a much smaller range of readers and knowers than is usual even for the authorial “we” in scholarly writing.John’s book deserves to be better read and more widely understood; it is a serious, impassioned, and original work that was important to a readership across Europe for over two hundred years. While its most interesting features resist easy analysis, the overarching structure is clear: the Liber florum in its finished form breaks down into three principal parts. Part I is a visionary autobiography and apologia for the work, explaining its personal background and divine delivery (the Book of Visions); part II is a lengthy liturgy addressed to God and the angels for infusion of divine and curricular knowledge (the Book of Prayers, culminating in a set of ritual instructions called the First Procedure); and part III contains more visions and a set of figures designed to work with and enhance the ritual process (the Book of Figures, whose opera- tions are sometimes called the “second procedure”).In the Book of Visions, John confesses to experimentation with both necro- mancy (nigromancia, or black magic) and a widely used and broadly con- demned angel magic text called the ars notoria, a ritual aiming to gain heavenly knowledge of the liberal arts, philosophy, and theology, which John’s own Book of Prayers is clearly structured to imitate. But John’s work is no lay or partially learned dabbling in magic; it flaunts its erudition unabashedly. Using a biblical trope well known from the writing of Saint Augustine, John explicitly plunders the ars notoria, pulling its “sacred and divine words” into his own book “as the Hebrews plundered the Egyptian treasure.” And even as it reflects John’s knowl- edge of late medieval magic texts, the whole work also records the process of its own composition under the guidance of the virgin Mary; its prayers, visualiza- tions, and figures are geared to enable the same sort of visionary communica- tion with the Virgin, Christ, and the angels that John himself experienced.John’s literate intertextual references, layered composition, and interweav- ing of visions, rituals, and autobiography all add to the complexity of his book. However, a further complication was introduced when the book was, in effect, broken in the middle by a condemnation in 1315 from certain “Barking Dogs,” who are not named but must have had professional knowledge of canon law. The Book of Figures, which had already been circulating for some years, con- tained figures which, to the Barking Dogs, too much resembled “necromantic” figures. The scandal ensuing from this condemnation effectively blocked fur- ther use of the original Book of Figures. John could not very well recall the condemned part of the text from his community of operators (after all, it had been approved and confirmed by the Virgin to begin with, and in all probabil- ity consecrated by individual operators when they copied it, too). Rather, he elected to add a new installment that offered an alternative model for the ritualand spiritual processes described in the first version. In great haste he rewrote the last part of his book, leaning even more heavily than before on the divine guidance and prophetic dreams that he describes to us as he goes along. The process of composition that resulted in the Flowers of Heavenly Teaching is thus partly represented as a rewriting of magic, but it is equally represented as a “delivered” text, a divinely inspired record of sacred communication that is mapped onto the work of the sacraments.Introducing this work to a modern audience, even an audience of medieval- ists, is something of a challenge. This is not only because of its internal reflexiv- ity and its erudite frame, but also because of how recently it was discovered in extant manuscripts. Until 1987, when the French scholar Jean Dupèbe briefly noticed one of the Munich copies of Liber florum in an article on the ars noto- ria, the work had been referenced in modern times only through the record of its condemnation. The first extended notice of this condemnation occurs in an entry for the year 1323 in the Grandes Chroniques de France, where it is written that a certain monk of Morigny had wanted to “inspire and renew a condemned heresy and sorcery called in Latin ars notoria.” The ars notoria is described, in a way conventional for the time, as a science that bestowed different branches of knowledge when its figures were contemplated with fasting and prayers, but which involved the invocation of “little known names which were firmly believed to be the names of demons.” According to the writer of this account, the monk, who himself condemned the ars notoria, nevertheless had com- piled a book filled with images in honor of the Virgin, the use of which pro- cured for the operator not only all branches of knowledge but also “any riches, honours or pleasures one wanted to have.” In the end, the book was declared “false and evil, against the Christian faith, and condemned to be burned and put on the fire.”To any interested and serious reader of the text, aspects of this description will appear in some respects inaccurate, if not unfair (Liber florum is explicitly not concerned with earthly honors or pleasures, for example), but at least it makes clear that John’s book is a work distinct from the ars notoria. Later paraphrases of this entry, however, blurred the distinction, eliding John’s Liber florum ever more closely with the ars notoria itself. A much-compressed ver- sion occurs already in the fourteenth-century chronicle of Guillaume de Nan- gis, in which the invocation of names “firmly believed to be the names of demons” are cited as part of the description not of the ars notoria, but of the anonymous monk’s own book. Later, in a notice in the sixteenth-century Antiquitez, croniques et singularitez de Paris, the still anonymous monk of Morigny is falsely credited with inventing the ars notoria itself. And later still, in a single, hastily compressed sentence in the compendious history of theintroduction 34 rewriting magicinquisition by Henry Charles Lea, published in 1887, John is not credited with writing anything at all: “A monk was seized at Paris in 1323 for possessing a book on the subject; the book was