ENGLAND & WALES 1552 SEBASTIAN MÜNSTER UNUSUAL ANTIQUE WOODCUT MAP LATIN EDITION

Anglia II Nova Tabula.

Description: Striking and highly detailed unusual 1552 Sebastian Münster's woodcut map of England & Wales. Covers also southern Scotland, north-eastern part of Ireland and the coast on north France. The woodblock map is filled with exaggerated topographical features with large castles denoting the cities. This map was a great improvement over previous maps of the region and showed for the first time several city names.
 
Munster's map of England was the first separately printed map of England and a landmark in the cartographic landmark in the history of British maps. The map is oriented with East at the top and extends to Edinburg in the North, also showing the East Coast of Ireland. A key in the upper left corner shows the English and Latin names for 17 major place names in England. The map includes the Royal Standard at the top center and the Scottish flag at lower left. The map is unchanged from the 1540 edition.
 
The sheet comes from the 1552 Latin Edition of Sebastian Münster's "Cosmographia".
 
The Cosmographia ("Cosmography") by Sebastian Münster (1488–1552) from 1544 is the earliest German-language description of the world.
 
It had numerous editions in different languages including Latin, French (translated by François de Belleforest), Italian, English, and Czech. The last German edition was published in 1628, long after his death. The Cosmographia was one of the most successful and popular books of the 16th century. It passed through 24 editions in 100 years. This success was due to the notable woodcuts (some by Hans Holbein the Younger, Urs Graf, Hans Rudolph Manuel Deutsch, and David Kandel). It was most important in reviving geography in 16th-century Europe. Among the notable maps within Cosmographia is the map "Tabula novarum insularum", which is credited as the first map to show the American continents as geographically discrete.
 
His earlier geographic works were Germania descriptio (1530) and Mappa Europae (1536). In 1540, he published a Latin edition of Ptolemy's Geographia with illustrations.
 
Editions:
 
German 1544, 1546, 1548, 1550, 1553, 1556, 1558, 1561, 1564, 1567, 1569, 1572, 1574, 1578, 1588, 1592, 1598, 1614, 1628
Latin 1550, 1552, 1554, 1559, 1572
French 1552, 1556, 1560, 1565, 1568, 1575
Italian 1558, 1575
Czech 1554. 

Date: 1552 ( undated )

Dimension:  Map size approx.: cm 34,4 x 25,1 === Paper size approx.: cm 36,6 x 31,1

Condition: Very strong and dark impression on good paper. Paper with chains. Map uncolored. Wide margins. Small foxing and browning. Map folded. Conditions are as you can see in the images.

Mapmaker: Sebastian Münster was born in Nierder-Ingelheim, near Mainz on 20th January 1488, the son of Andreas Münster. In 1505, he joined the Franciscan Order, and four years later was sent to the monastery of St. Katherina in Rufach. There he studied under Konrad Pelikan, who was to have great influence over the young man in the next five years. Pelikan was a teacher of Hebrew, Greek, mathematics and cosmography.
 
In 1529 Munster settled in Basle, where he was to spend the rest of his life. In 1540, Munster's edition of Ptolemy appeared, illustrated with 48 woodcut maps, the standard Ptolemaic corpus supplemented by a number of new maps, of great significance for the mapping of Europe.
 
Having completed the Geographia, Munster returned to his pet project, the description of Germany. In 1544, he published the first edition of the Cosmographia, a summary both of Munster's own geographical researches and those of his many correspondents. The Cosmographia, with its later expanded editions, was as close as Munster would come to fulfilling the vision of 1528.