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.