Ars Notoria: prayers and figures for acquiring knowledge

To learn grammar, rhetoric, logic, the arts of the quadrivium and even theology in a few days: this was the promise of the Ars Notoria, one of the most widespread magical texts of the Latin Middle Ages. Probably composed between the late twelfth and early thirteenth century and attributed to Solomon, the work proposed a course of prayers, fasting and contemplation of figures called «notes», through which the intellect would receive knowledge of the liberal arts by divine grace.

The notes and the prayers

The name derives from the notae, complex diagrams interweaving words, circles and geometric figures, each linked to a discipline. Alongside the figures, the text gathers Latin orations mixed with incomprehensible words presented as Greek, Hebrew or Chaldean. The calendar of recitations was tied to the phases of the moon, and each art had its own notes and specific prayers, in a rigorously ordered system.

Unlike many grimoires, the Ars Notoria does not summon demons and does not seek material goods. Its horizon is that of the students and clerics of the schools and the emerging universities, for whom knowledge was the key to a career. It was precisely this apparently devout character that made it dangerous in the eyes of theologians, because it turned prayer into a technique whose effects were held to be certain.

The theologians' condemnation

Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa theologiae, devotes an article to the ars notoria and judges it unlawful: the figures and unknown words, he observes, have no power of their own to cause knowledge, and if they produce effects these must be attributed to demons. The same judgement recurs in many later authors, and the art was condemned on several occasions, without this halting its spread.

A particularly interesting reaction is that of the Benedictine monk John of Morigny, who in the early fourteenth century, after practising the Ars Notoria, wrote an alternative work, the Liber florum celestis doctrine, with prayers and figures of Marian inspiration. This book too was judged suspect and was burned in Paris in 1323, a sign of how thin the line between devotion and magic could be.

Manuscripts and editions

The Ars Notoria survives in numerous manuscripts from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, some splendidly illuminated with the figures of the notes. The tradition is complex: there is an older version and a glossed version, enriched with commentary and additions. The French scholar Julien Véronèse published a critical edition in 2007 that clarified many stages of this textual history.

In 1657 Robert Turner published an English translation in London, lacking, however, the figures that had given the art its name. A related version appears as the fifth part in some manuscripts of the Lemegeton. Thus a medieval work born in the world of the schools entered a seventeenth-century collection of quite a different character, alongside the spirit catalogues of the Goetia.

The Ars Notoria is a privileged window onto the intellectual culture of the Middle Ages: it speaks of the eagerness to learn, the prestige of the liberal arts and the difficulty of drawing a clear line between prayer and technique. This is why it is now one of the magical texts most studied by historians of medieval universities and spirituality.