The Notory Art survives in medieval manuscripts and later printed editions. Sloane MS 1712, Munich Clm 30010, and Robert Turner’s 1657 English printing reveal different stages of its history.
Manuscripts and print
One title, several texts
Ars Notoria names a family of texts that join prayers, sacred names, and graphic marks to promises of knowledge. Solomon appears as a figure of authority within the tradition, although the surviving manuscripts were copied many centuries after the biblical period. The related Opus operum can occur in the same volume without being the same text: the British Library describes it on a separate run of folios in Sloane MS 1712. The two components share a binding and a learned setting, while their titles and boundaries remain distinct.
Turner’s 1657 English title advertises liberal sciences and memory. Its London printing also includes appended astrological material and presents the Notory Art to a seventeenth-century readership. That edition is a later stage in the work’s circulation, not a substitute for the handwritten notae. Clm 30010 shows another stage: red enclosures, writing, and diagrams share manuscript leaves. The contrast between the dense Munich page and Turner’s printed book makes the changing form of the tradition visible.
Clm 30010 in images
The Bavarian State Library catalog identifies schematic liberal-arts material on folios 15v–16r of Clm 30010. Digital scans 34 and 35 from the same manuscript show how red lines and Latin writing work together on the page. The figures are embedded in a written sequence, not isolated emblems. Their placement matters because the graphic signs belonged to prayers and named fields of learning. The manuscript’s visual structure is part of the text’s history, just as the separate folio ranges in Sloane MS 1712 are part of that volume’s history.
Related texts
The Ars Notoria history introduces the tradition. Its later place in the Lemegeton shows another stage of compilation; the Ars Goetia belongs to a different Solomonic textual family. The grimoire bibliography connects these works to particular manuscripts and editions.