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As Anne Lawrence-Mathers explains, centuries before Neo instantly mastered Kung Fu in The Matrix, and AI emerged promising quick command of any subject to any of us, medieval scholars found a shortcut to years of difficult study: a magical manuscript that promised to fast-track advanced learning. Anne Lawrence-Mathers investigates the Ars notoria, its supposed powers, and the demonic influence it had upon some users…

Mastering the full range of subjects taught in medieval universities normally required many years of hard and expensive study. From the thirteenth century on, however, an anonymous work known as the Ars notoria promised, through diagrams, incantations, and arcane rituals, to rapidly transmit to scholars the total knowledge of anything they might need. Condemned by church authorities, the fifty-six extant manuscripts nevertheless testify to the seductiveness of that offer.

Its complex diagrams were at the center of its appeal. Unlike diagrams in other magical texts, those in Ars notoria do not illustrate what the text is seeking to communicate. Nor do they act as models to be replicated in three-dimensional form as pieces of magical equipment. Instead, they supposedly work almost in the same way as religious icons. That is, faithful possession and use of them can offer direct contact with powerful and benign supernatural forces — and ultimately even with God. The diagrams themselves are the route to magic and consist of arrangements of symbolic and geometric forms, patterns, and symbols, interspersed with “words”, which are frequently unintelligible combinations of letters.³ Practitioners who opened their minds to receive and imprint these labyrinthine images, while reciting complex verbal formulae and strings of mysterious, almost unpronounceable words and names, are engaging in a significant act of trust.

Several factors made the Ars notoria fundamentally different from other magical texts. First, this is not a text in conflict with the church. In fact, the rituals framing and shaping usage of the images are presented as extremely pious, and the texts to be recited are identified as prayers. The alien words, names, and characters are explained as coming from ancient languages such as Greek, Hebrew, and “Chaldean”, and are claimed to preserve both the names of angels and words used to communicate with them. Second, the advantages offered are relatively virtuous: contact with spiritual beings and full knowledge of the subjects taught in medieval universities. Such claims cut little ice with thirteenth-century theologians, however, who saw clear links to things condemned as superstitious and demonic by St Augustine, despite the text’s assertion that it contains wisdom revealed to King Solomon.

St Thomas Aquinas was worried enough by the Ars notoria to name and condemn it specifically in his Summa theologiae — one of the most authoritative summaries of Christian teaching. He dealt with the very serious issue of superstition in Book Two, Part 2 — Question 96 is effectively devoted to the Ars notoria. Aquinas’ conclusion is wholly negative: the “art” is both “unlawful and futile”. It is futile because it cannot deliver what it promises. Still more seriously, its “signs” are neither understood by humans (like ordinary words and letters) nor sent by God (as sacraments are), and thus are precisely the type of thing that lures humans into contact and compact with demons.

That may seem a conclusive case for the rejection of the Ars notoria, especially as Aquinas’ objections were echoed by other major theologians. However, the number of surviving medieval copies of the work, and the fact that it was copied and owned in religious institutions until the end of the medieval period, show that the church ultimately had neither the interest nor ability to stamp it out. Moreover, it was translated in the early modern period and also went into print, demonstrating an ongoing — and more widespread — interest…

[Professor Lawrence-Mathers explains how the Ars notoria was used…]

… For some users, the rituals were so powerful that they seemed demonic. One of these was Brother John, an early fourteenth-century monk of the abbey of Morigny, near Étampes. John’s account of his introduction to the text, his powerful attraction to it, and the terrifying experiences he underwent while using it, was given in several chapters of John’s own, visionary work, the early fourteenth century Liber florum celestis doctrine.⁶

The great attraction of the Ars notoria for John was its promise of quick access to advanced scholarly knowledge. He recounts his continuing wish to study, and how he was lent a copy of a book of necromancy by “a certain cleric”. He copied much of it and wanted more. This led to an encounter with a “medical expert” from Lombardy, who informed John that what he needed was the Ars notoria, and that a copy of it was to be found within the walls of the school (at Orléans) where John had been sent. These details provide important evidence of the liminal status of works of ritual magic. They were recognised as dangerous, and were far from being officially approved, and yet were well known, owned and recommended by educated individuals, including monks and clerics.

For John, the Ars notoria was dangerous not in some abstract way, but very directly. He confesses that it struck him at first as beautiful and holy, and seemed to offer miraculous gifts rather than demonic temptations. It became apparent, however, that the book was utterly deceptive, a work of the Devil, a “sick pleasure” that was actually fatally poisonous to the soul, not only to the body…

Medieval “technology”: “Artificial Intelligence– Ars Notoria and the Promise of Instant Knowledge,” from @publicdomainrev.bsky.social.

Pair with: “The Cost of Seamlessness” from @taotuner.bsky.social, and “Experience vs. Efficiency: Why the Human Still Matters in Learning,” from @lnddave.bsky.social.

Also a (vaguely) apposite, but (very) amusing (in a macabre kind of way) report on a piece of OpenAI’s handiwork: “US government map of Africa mislabels every country at global conference.”

* Beverly Sills

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As we do the work, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965 that Frank Herbert’s Dune was published.

Herbert published a three-part serial Dune World in the monthly Analog, from December 1963 to February 1964. The serial was accompanied by several illustrations that were not published again. After an interval of a year, he published the much slower-paced five-part The Prophet of Dune in the January–May 1965 issues. The first serial became “Book One: Dune” in the final published Dune novel, and the second serial was divided into “Book Two: Muad’dib” and “Book Three: The Prophet”. The serialized version was expanded, reworked, and submitted to more than twenty publishers, each of whom rejected it. The novel, Dune, was finally accepted and published in August 1965 by Chilton Books, a printing house better known for publishing auto repair manuals. Sterling Lanier, an editor at Chilton, had seen Herbert’s manuscript and had urged his company to take a risk in publishing the book. However, the first printing, priced at $5.95 (equivalent to $60.79 in 2025), did not sell well and was poorly received by critics as being atypical of science fiction at the time. Chilton considered the publication of Dune a write-off and Lanier was fired. Over the course of time, the book gained critical acclaim, and its popularity spread by word-of-mouth to allow Herbert to start working full time on developing the sequels to Dune, elements of which were already written alongside Dune.

– source

Herbert died in 1986; his son Brian Herbert and author Kevin J. Anderson continued the series in over a dozen additional novels since 1999. Among them was Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, a prequel which chronicles the fictional Butlerian Jihad, a crusade by the last free humans in the universe against the thinking machines, a violent and dominating force led by the sentient computer Omnius.