A career documented through translations
The Bibliothèque nationale de France records de Givry as born in Paris in 1874 and dying there in 1929. His publications establish a sustained engagement with Italian and Latin texts. They include Savonarola’s treatise on stages of perfection in 1901, Paracelsus’s treatise on three primary essences in 1903 and John Dee’s Hieroglyphic Monad in 1925.
These were different forms of religious and philosophical writing, brought into French through translation. They give his later visual survey a background in textual work as well as collecting and comparison. The sources checked here establish this publication history more securely than the details of his personal life.
Historical images and their different purposes
Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy credits J. Courtenay Locke as English translator and announces ten colour plates and 366 illustrations in the text. De Givry selected and interpreted the material; the reproduced images have their own makers and histories. His preface emphasises documents gathered from libraries and collections and the citation of their sources.
The material ranges across sorcery, divination and alchemy. A hostile image of a supposed witch, an instruction for ritual and a symbolic design do different kinds of work. The winged composite figure and the picture contrasting two ways of life cannot be understood through a single modern label alone. Captions and surrounding prose connect each image to a historical argument, while also exposing the choices and assumptions through which de Givry assembled the survey.
