Basil Valentine

According to the legend printed with his books, Basil Valentine, in Latin Basilius Valentinus, was a Benedictine monk of St Peter's at Erfurt in the early fifteenth century, an adept who hid his manuscripts inside a pillar of the abbey church, where they were revealed generations later, in one telling by a thunderbolt splitting the stone. It is a splendid story, and there is no evidence any of it happened. No monastery record, Benedictine register or contemporary document attests a monk of that name, and the works themselves describe substances and processes, and quote authors, that belong to the late sixteenth century rather than the early fifteenth.

The books began appearing in 1599, published in Thuringia by Johann Tholde, a salt merchant and councilman of Frankenhausen with demonstrable chemical expertise of his own. Historians of alchemy have long argued that Tholde was author or part author of the corpus rather than its mere editor, though the case remains circumstantial and other hands may have contributed to later volumes. Modern scholarship, summarized in Lawrence Principe's history of the field, treats Basil Valentine as a deliberately constructed persona: a venerable monastic authority whose antiquity lent weight, and useful anonymity, to strikingly practical chemical writing. The atlas follows the tradition's own usage in keeping the entry under the famous name.

Two works carry most of the corpus's fame. The Twelve Keys, first printed in 1599, describes the preparation of the philosophers' stone in twelve allegorical stages, each a short enigmatic text later paired with a striking emblematic engraving; the sequence became one of the most reproduced allegories in all of alchemical literature, endlessly copied, illustrated and commented on. The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony, published in 1604, is by contrast startlingly concrete: a sustained treatise on the preparations of antimony, their manufacture and their medical uses, defending the metal's remedies against the Galenist physicians of the day.

The corpus popularized the doctrine that all substances contain three principles, mercury, sulfur and salt, extending the Paracelsian tria prima, and its practical recipes could often be repeated at the bench, which gave the books unusual staying power as chemistry emerged from chymistry. Isaac Newton, among many others, read and annotated Basilian texts closely. That the author was almost certainly not a medieval monk changes none of this influence, but it matters for how the books are read: they are documents of the decades around 1600, their monastic frame a piece of publishing theater, and the atlas records both the persona and the real, still partly unresolved question of who stood behind it.