In Rewriting Magic, Claire Fanger explores a fourteenth-century textual content referred to as The plant life of Heavenly Teaching. Written by way of a Benedictine monk named John of Morigny, the paintings all yet disappeared from the old checklist, and it is just now coming to gentle back in a number of types and copies. whereas John’s booklet principally contains a longer set of prayers for gaining wisdom, The plant life of Heavenly Teaching is uncommon between prayer books of its time since it features a visionary autobiography with intimate information regarding the book’s notion and composition. in the course of the window of this list, we witness how John reconstructs and reconsecrates a condemned liturgy for wisdom acquisition: the ars notoria of Solomon. John’s paintings used to be the topic of severe feedback and public scandal, and his ebook used to be burned as heretical in 1323. The trauma of those reviews left its imprint at the ebook, yet in unforeseen and infrequently baffling methods. Fanger decodes this imprint whilst she relays the narrative of the way she discovered to appreciate it. In attractive prose, she explores the dual strategies of information acquisition in John’s visionary autobiography and her personal paintings of discovery as she reconstructed the history to his notable booklet. Fanger’s method of her topic exemplifies leading edge ancient inquiry, examine, and technique. half theology, half historic anthropology, half biblio-memoir, Rewriting Magic relates a narrative that may have deep implications for the learn of medieval existence, monasticism, prayer, magic, and religion.