The Naming of AmericaMartin Waldseemüller’s 1507 World Map and the Cosmographiae Introductio
Published by GILES in association with The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C
Publish Date — February 2008 (UK and USA)
Dimensions — 128 pages, 191mm x 229mm (7 ½ in. x 9 in.), landscape
Illustrations — 22 colour illustrations
Hardback price — UK£12.95/USA$24.95
ISBN — 1-904832-49-0
ISBN — 978-1-904832-49-2
Book Details (pdf) — Naming_of_America_AI.pdf
Sales Points
The first sheet-by-sheet colour facsimile of Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map – one of the most important maps in the history of cartography
Summarizes the current state of knowledge on Waldseemüller and his collaborators
Features a completely new translation of the Cosmographiae Introductio – Waldseemüller’s guidebook to his famous map – and identifies Waldseemüller’s sources
About the Book
This new book features a facsimile of the 1507 World Map by Martin Waldseemüller – the first map ever to display the name America – and tells the fascinating story behind its creation in 16th-century France and rediscovery 300 years later in the library of Wolfegg Castle, Germany, in 1901. It also includes a completely new translation and commentary to Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann’s seminal cartographic text, the Cosmographiae Introductio, which originally accompanied the World Map.
The Cosmographiae Introductio by Martin Waldseemüller (ca. 1470-ca.1521) and Matthias Ringmann (1482-1511) was printed in two editions in 1507 in the small village of St. Dié in North Eastern France, under the patronage of Duke René II of Lorraine. Its importance stems from the mention on its title page of two maps that appear to have originally been part of the book. One of these maps, described in Latin as a plano, is Martin Waldseemüller’s famous 1507 World Map. It represents the continents of North and South America with a shape similar to those we would recognize today, eparated from Asia by the Pacific Ocean. The other map, called a solido, was a printed globe gore that is thought to be the first of its kind. Together, the 1507 map and the Cosmographiae introductio occupy a crucial place in history, between the discovery of the New World by Columbus in 1492 and the birth of the scientific revolution with Copernicus in 1543.
John Hessler considers answers to some of the key questions raised by the map’s representation of the New World, including “How was it possible for a small group of cartographers to have produced a view of the world so radical for its time and so close to the one we recognize today?”; and “What evidence did they possess to show the existence of the Pacific Ocean when neither Vasco Nûnez de Balboa nor Ferdinand Magellan had yet reached it?”. There are no easy answers, and yet, as this fascinating book reveals, this group of unknowns created some of the most important maps in the history of cartography, and afford us a glimpse into an age when accepted scientific and geographic principles fell away, spawning the birth of modernity.
