Grimorium Verum Editions: The 1517 Imprint and Later Witnesses

The date 1517 is part of Grimorium Verum’s printed self-presentation. The surviving copy, catalogue descriptions, and related manuscripts answer different questions about when the text circulated.

Printed claim: Memphis, 1517
Surviving print: British Library 8632.aa.5
Related manuscript: Wellcome MS.983, c. 1709

Witness	What is documented	What it cannot prove alone
Alibeck print, BL 8632.aa.5	Printed Memphis, 1517 claim; 69-page copy	Actual publication in Memphis in 1517
British Library description quoted by Peterson	Supplied date shown as [1817]	An exact first composition date
Wellcome MS.983	Related French pseudo-Solomonic manuscript, c. 1709	Identity with the later Alibeck print
Wellcome MS.4667	French Solomonic manuscript milieu, mid-eighteenth century	A direct Verum copy or ancestor

What the title page actually says

The surviving French printing gives itself a Latin Solomonic title, a French statement that it was translated from Hebrew by Plaingière, and the imprint “A Memphis, Chez Alibeck, l’Egyptien. 1517.” Those words can be checked against the digitized 69-page British Library copy indexed by Google Books. They establish what the book claims about its own origin. They do not, by themselves, establish that a printer operated under that name in Memphis in 1517 or that a Hebrew original has been identified. A striking title page can be an argument for authority as much as a bibliographic record.

Joseph H. Peterson reproduces a British Library description of the same copy under shelfmark 8632.aa.5 and gives the imprint date as “1517 [1817].” The brackets signal a supplied date, distinguished from the date printed in the book. Our reading room keeps both values visible. Google Books presents 1517 as the publisher date because that is what appears in the imprint; this metadata repeats the book’s claim rather than providing independent evidence of sixteenth-century publication.

An earlier related manuscript is a different object

Wellcome Collection catalogues L’art Magique, MS.983, as a French manuscript of about 1709. Its first tract is a pseudo-Solomonic grimoire; the same volume also contains material attributed to Pietro d’Abano and a work concerning Uriel. Its coloured title leaf and diagrams belong to that manuscript, not to the later Alibeck printing. Wellcome itself notes that the manuscript title-page date is puzzling: “MCCCIX” appears there, while its catalogue supplies an approximate eighteenth-century date. That is a reminder that old numerals in a manuscript can also be historical claims or copying errors.

A 2024 edition catalogued by Wellcome describes MS.983 as influencing later works including Grimorium Verum. That is a useful scholarly comparison, but the institutional record does not make MS.983 the sole proven exemplar of the British Library printing. Its contents allow us to compare patterns of spirit hierarchy, tools, and Solomonic language across the wider textual family. Its own shelfmark, material form, and date remain separate from the printed book’s claims.

The related French manuscripts

A second Wellcome French manuscript, Pseudo-Solomon MS.4667, is catalogued to the mid-eighteenth century. It contains a substantial Solomonic tract followed by other magical works and drawings. It documents the breadth of the French manuscript milieu, but the catalogue does not identify it as another copy of the Alibeck printing. Calling every similar French Clavicle a Grimorium Verum manuscript would erase precisely the differences that make the witnesses valuable.

The Alibeck title page prints 1517, while a British Library description quoted by Peterson supplies [1817]. Wellcome dates MS.983 to about 1709. The dates belong to different kinds of evidence: an imprint claim, a later catalogue estimate, and a related manuscript. They do not establish a secure first publication year for Grimorium Verum, nor turn MS.983 into the surviving printed edition.

Worked comparison: an instruction whose figure is missing

Early in the “key of the work,” the Alibeck print tells the reader to engrave the present character in reversed form, add personal initials, make it at a stated planetary time, and carry it on the body. The prose treats the character as indispensable, yet the required figure is absent from this impression. This is a concrete break in the operation’s logic: the text specifies material, timing, personalization, and placement, but withholds the diagram that joins those steps into one object.

Peterson’s comparative presentation can supply a figure from Wellcome MS.4667, while also warning that figures in later printed editions were not always informed by the manuscript tradition. Those images answer a modern editorial need; they do not become marks visible in the Alibeck copy. The missing figure therefore helps distinguish three witnesses at once: an incomplete printed instruction, a related manuscript that preserves a candidate design, and later editions that fill the space differently. A seamless modern page can conceal exactly this evidence of textual loss and repair.

Reading the witnesses

The Memphis 1517 date and Solomonic attribution are printed claims. The supplied [1817] date and manuscript dates are later catalogue judgments about different objects.

Source records and editions

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