Lawrence Principe

The Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine (German: Ein kurtz summarischer Tractat, von dem grossen Stein der Uralten lit. 'A Short Summary Tract: Of the Great Stone of the Ancients') is a widely reproduced alchemical book attributed to Basil Valentine. It was first published in 1599 by Johann Thölde who is likely the book's true author. It is presented as a sequence of alchemical operations encoded allegorically in words, to which images have been added. The first part of the book is a discussion of ge…