Ptolemy’s Geography with 17 Supplemental Maps, 1513
This deluxe folio volume, handsomely bound in late-medieval manuscript music binding waste, reproduces Ptolemy’s Geography in forty-two hand-colored double-page printed maps of the world, mostly as they were understood in the ancient world. Seventeen others appear in a subsequent Supplementum, which update Ptolemy’s ancient geography with more recent cartographic knowledge obtained for the three continents known to him—Europe, Africa, and Asia. Alas, Martin Waldseemüller’s all-important Tabula terre nove, or “Admiral’s Map,” representing Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the New World, is missing, as is the case in other copies, owing to its status as the first substantial printed map to represent the New World. It is only a small consolation that this missing map was preceded in print by only two others, the first in the 1511 Seville edition of Peter Martyr’s Decades of the New World, which survives in only 12 recorded copies—one of which is in the John Work Garrett Library at JHU.
This edition of Ptolemy’s Geography opens with a discourse on the Hellenistic understanding of the world, complete with engravings of cartographical instruments and calculations, before presenting the magnificent series of maps of the known world, beginning with faithful reproductions of manuscript maps that purported to be based on Ptolemy’s “originals,” though none actually survive from the ancient world. This volume’s famous mappa mundi depicts a Hellenistic world map terminating at the eastern Atlantic. The three continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia are surrounded by mythological personifications of the twelve classical winds, each with charming, wind-tossed blonde hair, which orient the reader around a “wind rose”—the ancient equivalent of a compass. The subsequent twenty-five maps detail distinct regions of the world, taking the reader on a voyage through ten maps of Europe, four of Africa—which had gone largely unexplored by the Hellentistic Greeks—and eleven of Asia.
One particularly interesting map in the Peabody Library copy illustrates the expansion of German towns and cities in the Holy Roman Empire, which are delineated by an abundance of red towers and castles that reflect increasing urbanization and population density, as well as the costly castellation required to defend these growing territories from hostile invasion. The European maps contrast sharply with the newly rendered coastlines and topographies of Africa and the Indian subcontinent, which had largely remained terra incognita until the half-century prior to the printing of this book. Whereas the ancient Ptolemaic map of Africa ends in the Sahara, the updated early modern version manifests the global expansionism and nascent imperialism spearheaded by the Portuguese in the previous century—reflected here with an indication of the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope by Bartolomeu Dias in 1488.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones (eds.), Ptolemy’s Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters (Princeton University Press, 2000); Evelyn Edson, “The Recovery of Ptolemy’s Geography,” in The World Map, 1300–1492 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 114–40; Alexander Jones, “Ptolemy’s Geography: Mapmaking and the Scientific Enterprise,” in Richard J. A. Talbert (ed.), Ancient Perspectives: Maps and Their Place in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome (University of Chicago Press, 2012), 109–28; Alfred Hiatt, “Mutation and Supplement: The 1513 Strasbourg Ptolemy,” in Zur Shalev and Charles Burnett (eds.), Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’ in the Renaissance (The Warburg Institute, 2011), 143–61.
