Nova Totivs Evropae Tabvla, ex magnis Gerardi de Iudaeis P[atris] desumpta…

Description

St. Brendan’s Island, Hy-Brasil, and Frisland, a Massive Nova Zembla, Multiple Northeast Passages, and Twenty Costumed Europeans, in Excellent Original Color.

This vivid and richly decorated map of Europe is one of the rarer productions of sixteenth-century Flemish cartography: the Nova Totius Europae Tabula issued by Cornelis de Jode in the second and final edition of the Speculum Orbis Terrarum in 1593 — a map not present in the first edition of 1578 and not widely replicated thereafter.

It is a map that cannot quite decide between the world as it was and the world as it was imagined, populating the Atlantic with three of the great phantom islands of European geographical mythology while simultaneously pressing into the Arctic with the most current northern knowledge available to a Flemish engraver in the early 1590s.

The map is dedicated to Theodoric Echter von Mespelbrunn, counselor to the Holy Roman Emperor and first adviser to Julius Echter, Prince-Bishop of Würzburg, an original dedication to one of the dominant ecclesiastical households of Counter-Reformation Germany.

The Map in Detail

The composition covers the continent from the Atlantic archipelagos in the west to the borders of Muscovy and Tartary in the east, and from a northern ocean thick with speculative geography down to the coast of North Africa (Africae Pars). The decorative cartouche at the top center is framed by portrait medallions and a double red rule, with the full title and dedication text nested within. A red-ruled border frames the sheet.

The Atlantic is the map’s most theatrical quadrant. Three legendary islands appear in succession:

1. S. Brandain, the Isle of St. Brendan, the mythical Atlantic landfall attributed to the sixth-century Irish monk whose alleged voyage westward into the ocean had furnished European cartographers with a placeholder for the unknown Atlantic for eight centuries.
2. Bresil, the phantom island (Hy-Brasil) that had haunted the waters west of Ireland on European charts since the fourteenth century and whose name (probably coincidentally) was eventually attached to the South American country.
3. Frislandt, the great fiction of the Zeno map, published in Venice in 1558, which fabricated the record of a fourteenth-century North Atlantic voyage and introduced an entirely imaginary island south of Iceland that Mercator, Ortelius, and their successors duly copied for decades.

All three islands share the Atlantic with the real Azores (Afores Insulæ) and Canary Islands, the phantom and the actual coexisting without evident tension.

In the far north, Nova Zeml A appears in the exaggerated scale characteristic of its earliest cartographic representations. By 1593, the archipelago was known to European geographers through English and Dutch commercial probing of the northern sea routes; though the detailed charting of Barentsz’s three expeditions (1594–1597) still lay ahead, Oliver Brunel had reached its coasts in the 1580s. The ambition to find a Northeast Passage north of Russia to Asia is encoded in the multiple passage routes shown threading through the Arctic waters above the continent.

To the right of the map, a large inset panel presents twenty figures, arranged in rows and captioned with European nationalities and displaying the characteristic dress of the continent’s inhabitants. They represent a standard feature of the de Jode atlas tradition, combining geography and ethnography in the manner that made the great Flemish atlases as much encyclopedias as maps.

Historical Context

Gerard de Jode (1509–1591) spent years attempting to bring the Speculum Orbis Terrarum to press against the determined opposition of Abraham Ortelius, who held the privilege for atlas publication in the Habsburg Netherlands and used it to delay his competitor. When the Speculum finally appeared in 1578, it was greeted as a serious achievement but never achieved the same commercial reach as the Theatrum. Gerard died in 1591; his son Cornelis issued a revised and expanded second edition in 1593, which included this Europe map, before himself dying in 1600. The second edition is substantially rarer than the first, and individual maps from it appear on the market infrequently.

The dedication to Theodoric Echter von Mespelbrunn places the map squarely within one of the defining political households of late sixteenth-century Germany. Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn, Prince-Bishop of Würzburg from 1573 to 1617, was among the most powerful ecclesiastical princes in the Holy Roman Empire and a determined architect of Counter-Reformation recatholicization in Franconia. Theodoric, addressed here as counselor to both the Emperor and the Prince-Bishop, belonged to this same world of confessional authority at the height of its ambition.

Publication History and Census

Cornelis de Jode (publisher), after Gerard de Jode. From: Speculum Orbis Terrarum, second edition, Antwerp, 1593. The map was issued only in the 1593 second edition of the Speculum and is among the rarer maps of the atlas. Note: the date as engraved on the plate reads MDCXIII, an engraver’s error for MDXCIII (1593) — the transposition of C and XC a slip that presumably went uncorrected.