Anonymus Valesianus[1] (or Excerpta Valesiana) is the conventional title of a compilation of two fragmentary vulgar Latin chronicles, named for its modern editor, Henricus Valesius, who published the texts for the first time in 1636, together with his first printed edition of the Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus.
[2] When Henricus' brother Hadrian [fr] re-edited the Anonymus in an edition of Ammianus Marcellinus in 1681, it was the first time that the two excerpts were clearly separated.
Following the death of Meermann, the collection passed to an English collector, Sir Thomas Phillipps (Codex Phillippsianus 1885).
[2] Anonymus Valesianus I (or Excerptum Valesianum I), sometimes given the separate conventional title Origo Constantini Imperatoris ("The Lineage of the Emperor Constantine") possibly dates from around 390, and is generally regarded as providing a reliable source.
[4] In 1963 Arnaldo Momigliano summarized the results of scholarship on Origo Constantini in the words that "All is in doubt about the first part of the Anonymus Valesianus".
[2] The identity of the author and the circumstances of the compilation of the Pars Posterior is obscure, however a few scholars think it "based on a no longer extant chronicle by the bishop of Ravenna, Maximianus".