Sebastian Münster Ptolemaic World Map with Twelve Wind Heads, Enclosed Indian Ocean, and Unknown Southern Land.
Ptolemeisch General Tafel / die hable kugel der Welt begreiffende.
$1,800
1 in stock
Description
This is Sebastian Münster’s endlessly fascinating woodcut Ptolemaic world map, from the most popular geographical book of the 16th century. It presents the Oikumene, the inhabited world as described by Claudius Ptolemy in the second century AD, surrounded by twelve personified wind heads.
The Map in Detail
The Ptolemaic world map is framed within a border of clouds from which twelve named wind heads blow: Septentrio, Aquilo, Cacias, Subsolanus, Vulturnus, Euroanster, Auster, Lybs Afric, Lybonatus, Zephyrus, Corus, and Circius. The map drawn on a conic projection: Europe in the upper left, Africa swelling southward before connecting, as Ptolemy imagined it, to a vast southern landmass enclosing the Indian Ocean.
This enclosed sea, labeled Mare Indicum, is the most distinctive feature of Ptolemaic world geography, and one of the most visually compelling elements of the map. At its southern edge lies Terra Incognita Secundum Ptolemaeum, the unknown land that the ancient geographer posited to seal the bottom of his world.
Arabia Felix, Mare Rubrum (the Red Sea), and Sinus Barbaris crowd the familiar geography of the Near East; the massive island of Taprobana (modern Sri Lanka, though Münster’s contemporaries debated whether it was Sumatra) dominates the Indian Ocean out of all proportion to its true size, a relic of its enormous importance to ancient spice traders. Scandinavia appears as Septentrional Regiones, a later addition to the standard Ptolemaic map.
The verso presents a wind rose diagram captioned Die Nammen bnd Gegne der Wind (The Names and Directions of the Winds), laying out the 16 principal wind directions in German. Beside it, beneath a fine decorative woodcut header, is the introduction to “Die ander General” (the second general map) in which Münster explains the Ptolemaic projection to his German readers: how the map is divided from west to east across 180 degrees of longitude, and from the equator outward by parallels of ten degrees each, so that the position of every country can be understood in relation to its neighbors.
Historical Context
Sebastian Münster (1488–1552) was among the greatest German geographers of the sixteenth century, a Hebraist, humanist, and cosmographer who produced in his Cosmographia both the most complete description of the world available to German readers, and an extended meditation on the relationship between ancient authority and modern discovery. The Cosmographia first appeared in 1544 and went through twenty-four editions in five languages before its final printing in 1628, long after Münster died of the plague.
Throughout, the book wrestled with the tension its title page embodies: how to reconcile Ptolemy’s authoritative ancient geography with the rapidly expanding knowledge brought home by Portuguese navigators, Spanish conquistadors, and Dutch merchants. Münster answered by including both, a Ptolemaic world map alongside a modern one, and letting the contrast speak for itself.
The woodcut on the recto is an enlarged, redrawn version of Münster’s earlier Ptolemaic map, introduced into the German Cosmographia in 1588 by Sebastian Henric Petri, the author’s step-grandson, who had inherited the Basel printing house. It replaced a smaller and simpler woodcut that had served since 1540. The new block brought the map into stylistic alignment with contemporary Ortelius cartography while retaining its deliberately archaic geographic content. That content was, of course, the point: in 1588, every educated reader knew the world had grown enormously beyond Ptolemy’s horizon; the Ptolemaic map was included not because it was accurate but because Ptolemy remained the essential foundation of any geographical education.
Publication History and Census
This woodcut was added to the German Cosmographia in 1588 and appeared without material change in the subsequent German editions of 1592, 1598, 1614, and 1628; five editions in all, all in German, all published by the Petri press in Basel. It did not appear in the Latin, French, Italian, or Czech editions of the Cosmographia. The German and Latin editions of the Cosmographia are well represented in institutional libraries as complete volumes; separate leaves with both recto and verso intact are considerably less common. Reference: Shirley 162.
Cartographer(s):
Sebastian Münster (1488-1552) was a cosmographer and professor of Hebrew who taught at Tübingen, Heidelberg, and Basel. He settled in Basel in 1529 and died there, of the plague, in 1552. Münster was a networking specialist and stood at the center of a large network of scholars from whom he obtained geographic descriptions, maps, and directions.
As a young man, Münster joined the Franciscan order, in which he became a priest. He studied geography at Tübingen, graduating in 1518. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Basel for the first time, where he published a Hebrew grammar, one of the first books in Hebrew published in Germany. In 1521, Münster moved to Heidelberg, where he continued to publish Hebrew texts and the first German books in Aramaic. After converting to Protestantism in 1529, he took over the chair of Hebrew at Basel, where he published his main Hebrew work, a two-volume Old Testament with a Latin translation.
Münster published his first known map, a map of Germany, in 1525. Three years later, he released a treatise on sundials. But it would not be until 1540 that he published his first cartographic tour de force: the Geographia universalis vetus et nova, an updated edition of Ptolemy’s Geography. In addition to the Ptolemaic maps, Münster added 21 modern maps. Among Münster’s innovations was the inclusion of map for each continent, a concept that would influence Abraham Ortelius and other early atlas makers in the decades to come. The Geographia was reprinted in 1542, 1545, and 1552.
Münster’s masterpiece was nevertheless his Cosmographia universalis. First published in 1544, the book was reissued in at least 35 editions by 1628. It was the first German-language description of the world and contained 471 woodcuts and 26 maps over six volumes. The Cosmographia was widely used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and many of its maps were adopted and modified over time, making Münster an influential cornerstone of geographical thought for generations.
Condition Description
Very good.
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