Ars Notoria has an earlier manuscript life than the four-book or five-book Lemegeton arrangement. The drawings called notae are central evidence, even where a later English print omits them.
A precise medieval witness
The British Library dates Sloane MS 1712 to the thirteenth century and describes two Ars Notoria-related texts. Folios 1r–22r contain a text headed Ars Notoria with diagrammatic notae on several arts; folios 22v–37r contain a derivative Opus Operum attributed to John of Morigny. The catalogue names individual figures on folios 14v–22r and 36r–37r, including grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, and theology. These are distinct manuscript figures rather than interchangeable occult circles. The catalogue currently reports that digitized images of Sloane MS 1712 are unavailable.
The promise in the text
Ars Notoria links prayers, names, and graphic figures with an extraordinary promise of learning. The subjects named in the surviving manuscript are disciplines of medieval education. That promise is a claim made by the historical text; the manuscript is evidence that it was written, not that it worked. The text’s attribution to Solomon likewise expresses a claim of ancient authority; the British Library’s thirteenth-century date identifies a surviving witness, not an autograph of the biblical king. A diagram may structure reading, memory, or devotion differently from an ordinary paragraph, which is why a translation without figures can be difficult to interpret. The visual program is evidence about what some copyists and readers considered integral to the work.
Why Turner’s 1657 edition matters
Robert Turner printed an English Ars Notoria in London in 1657. Wellcome’s record supplies the imprint, pagination, and the fact that an Astrological Catechism accompanies the printed item. This is a concrete seventeenth-century publication, not a medieval Latin manuscript. Peterson argues that the Lemegeton’s fifth-book material, where present, depends on Turner’s printed translation and that the figures are missing from that print. The wording of a Lemegeton appendix can therefore reveal its dependence on Turner. The sequence runs from medieval textual family to a later English print to one branch of a multi-book compilation; it is not one unchanged work transmitted directly from antiquity.
Worked comparison: one grammar nota in Sloane 1712 and Turner’s figureless print
Sloane MS 1712 gives grammar a visible place in a larger program of the liberal arts. The British Library catalogue locates its diagrammatic notae from folio 14v onward and identifies separate figures for grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, and theology. In the Ars Notoria’s own explanation, grammar has three notes because it is divided into three capacities: inflection, the ordering or agreement of parts, and the division of simple and compound expression. The number of figures is thus an argument about the structure of the subject, not decorative numbering.
The prayers also distinguish the three grammatical notes. The first pair of orations belongs at the beginning of the first note; another precedes the second; another precedes the third. Later directions assign repeated acts of looking and recitation on specified days. Image, prayer, sequence, and time form one reading technology. A surviving grammar diagram is evidence of that coordinated program even though the manuscript does not demonstrate that the promised sudden mastery occurred.
Turner’s 1657 English print transmits the prose that explains the three notes and prints the prayers, but it does not print the diagrams. The result is structurally incomplete in a revealing way: the reader is told to look upon “these Notes,” hears why grammar has three figures, and receives different prayers for the first, second, and third note, yet no visual object appears at those points. The missing image is not a small illustration loss. It removes the element that the verbs of looking, inspecting, and repeating are organized around.
The prose still preserves the conceptual diagram behind the lost graphics. It assigns one note to declension, another to ordering parts, and another to division, then gives each its own verbal preparation. That internal three-part logic prevents a modern editor from treating any attractive Ars Notoria circle as “the grammar nota.” A replacement would need to come from a named witness and occupy the same place in its sequence. Turner provides the textual slots, but not enough visual evidence to reconstruct what filled them.
This difference explains why the fifth Lemegeton book cannot stand for the whole Ars Notoria tradition. Where a Lemegeton appendix follows Turner’s printed line, it inherits prose already separated from the medieval visual sequence. Sloane 1712 shows what that sequence could contain; Turner shows how a seventeenth-century reader could receive its verbal shell. Comparing one discipline across them turns “with or without figures” into an interpretive difference: the manuscript coordinates sight and prayer, while the print leaves the reader with instructions whose central visual referent is absent.