Abstract

John of Morigny (fl. c. 1301–15) is important both for what his writing reveals about the culture of learned magic at the turn of the fourteenth century and for his own contribution to that culture, the Liber florum celestis doctrine. The Liber florum is an unusual work, some 55,000 words in its most commonly circulated form, comprising a devotional autobiography with visions (the Book of Visions), a long liturgy for knowledge acquisition (the Book of Prayers) and a work of meditative figures (the Book of Figures). Unknown between the mid-sixteenth and late twentieth centuries, copies of the book began to be noticed in the late 1980s. The majority of its more than twenty currently known manuscripts have been found over the last fifteen years. It survives in two authorial versions, the Old Compilation (OC) (1311) and the New Compilation (NC) (1315), and two versions of a later redaction. ¹