The 1657 English book is a dated publication with a translator, printer, seller, and appended material. It cannot stand in for every medieval illustrated copy.
A translated book made for the London market
Robert Turner’s Ars notoria was printed in London by J. Cottrel and sold by Martha Harison in 1657. The physical record describes eight unnumbered pages followed by 168 numbered pages, a form shaped by type, gatherings, commercial distribution, and an English reading public. Turner identifies himself as the translator of material “originally” in Latin, while the title invokes Solomon and a larger chain of ancient authorities. Those claims establish the book’s desired pedigree; the imprint establishes the publication that actually survives. Translation changes more than vocabulary. It turns recurring prayers and technical directions into seventeenth-century English, supplies headings and divisions that readers can navigate, and places medieval claims about revealed learning inside a print culture already crowded with astrological and magical books. The resulting object is a historical interpretation of the Notory Art, not a transparent window onto every earlier Latin manuscript.
The contents move from Notory Art to astrology
The title promises a cabalistical key of magical operations, liberal sciences, divine revelation, and memory. Wellcome’s record also identifies “The golden flowers,” attributed within the volume to Apollonius, as part of the first portion. Pages 139–168 then contain an astrological catechism. That final thirty-page block occupies almost one fifth of the numbered book and changes the mode of reading: questions and answers about judicial astrology follow material organized around prayers and intellectual gifts. The appended catechism is not a minor line on the title page. It makes the volume a composite publication whose marketable scope reaches beyond the medieval notory program. A reader who stops at the shared word “Solomon” misses this internal architecture. Turner’s book joins materials that a manuscript catalogue may describe separately, and its closing section teaches a technical celestial art rather than extending a cycle of subject-specific notae.
What prose must carry when figures disappear
Medieval witnesses integrate full-page notae with prayers and named arts. Turner’s print circulated without a comparable illustrated cycle, so translated prose had to carry references to visual and ritual actions that the reader could not inspect in the same sequence. The loss is structural. In Sloane 1712, moving from two-column writing into a full-page figure changes the reader’s task from following sentences to surveying compartments, names, colors, and symbols at once. Printed prose restores a continuous forward movement through lines and pages. Even a detailed verbal description cannot recreate the spatial relation among inscriptions or the pause created by an image that fills a leaf. Turner therefore preserves a verbal route through the tradition while altering its cognitive rhythm. The publication remains central evidence for English reception, but it cannot be used to infer that medieval copies were predominantly unillustrated or that their figures were optional ornaments.
Translation and attribution create several voices
The printed book speaks through layers. Solomon functions as the legendary source of wisdom; Apollonius is associated with the Golden Flowers; other ancient names extend the work’s authority; and Turner appears as the person who “Englished” the material for 1657. The astrological catechism adds another instructional voice near the end. These voices do not belong to one historical moment. The title page deliberately compresses them into a lineage, while the imprint and catalogue separate what can be dated with confidence. This layered authorship helps explain shifts in tone: devotional petitions, promises of memory, explanatory directions, and catechetical astrology can sit under one cover without forming a single continuous speech by Solomon. It also changes how the book should be compared with Sloane 1712, whose first rubric names Solomon, Machineus, and Euclid and whose second work carries an attribution to John of Morigny. Both witnesses construct authority, but they assemble different names around different contents.
Worked comparison: a subject nota and a printed promise
Sloane 1712 assigns multiple full-page figures to grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, and theology. A reader can identify where rhetoric ends, where geometry begins, and where the theological figure closes the first work because the codex changes its visual field. Turner’s title still promises the liberal sciences and an art of memory, yet the printed witness does not offer that subject-by-subject image sequence. The same goal therefore arrives through a different apparatus. In the manuscript, a named discipline is tied to a particular leaf, quantity of notae, and arrangement of colored writing. In the print, the promise is carried by English wording, headings, prayer sequences, and the authority named on the title page. The later Lemegeton appendix represents another act of compilation after Turner. The worked contrast shows transmission through subtraction and addition: the figures fall away, English prose expands access, an astrological catechism is added, and the old title continues to hold the parts together. Pagination strengthens the printed logic. The separate block on pages 139–168 gives the catechism a measurable place that manuscript notae once made visible by changes of page design. Print substitutes numbered extent and headings for part of the spatial guidance supplied by color and full-page figures.