Sebastian Münster’s first map of Scandinavia, attempting to reconcile the geography of northern Europe, Greenland, and the New World. Published only in the 1540 and 1542 editions of his Geography and thus quite scarce on the market.

The map extends from Denmark and the Baltic northward to Lapland, with Iceland and a portion of Scotland at the left. Towns appear as miniature clusters of towers, forests cover much of the eastern territory, and tents and animals populate the far north. A nearly continuous mountain barrier divides Norway from Sweden, while an enormous land bridge joins Scandinavia to Greenland.

At the western edge, “Terra nova, sive de Bacolhos”—New Land, or Land of Codfish—is a reference to relatively recent European discoveries in North America. A large and strategically placed text panel enables Münster to leave the precise relationship between Greenland and North America uncertain.

The map clearly expands on Jacob Ziegler’s 1532 map of Scandinavia, as is evident from the range of mountains bisecting Norway, the land bridge linking Scandinavia and Greenland, and the adoption of much of Ziegler’s toponomy. Münster however extended the treatment eastward well into Russia, offered a more refined and detailed treatment of Denmark, and greatly reduced the size of Greenland.

The Latin text on the reverse is an equally interesting mixture of practical information and inherited lore. Münster describes Norway’s stockfish trade, explaining why the January catch keeps better for export, but also reports whales a hundred cubits long whose movements create whirlpools dangerous to ships. Iceland’s luxuriant pasture supposedly requires livestock to be driven away lest they become fat enough to suffocate, while its perpetual volcanic fires are said to imprison impure souls. These passages give the map a human dimension, conveying both the economic importance of the North and the stories through which distant readers understood it.

This is the second state of the map, issued in 1542, identifiable by the punctuation and two leaf ornaments in the title, together with the resetting of the text panels and verso. Münster introduced a new map based on Olaus Magnus’s nine-sheet “Carta Marina” in his Cosmography of 1544; it replaced the present map in the next edition of the Geography, published in 1545.

Sebastian Münster
Münster (1488–1552) was a Rhineland-born humanist who made his career in Basel, where he taught Hebrew at the university while pursuing geography, mathematics, and cosmography. Though trained in the Franciscan order he later embraced Lutheranism, a necessity for an academic in Basel. He became one of the central figures in the mid-16th-century revival of geographic learning, best known today for his hugely popular edition of Ptolemy’s Geography (first issued 1540) and his own Cosmography (1544), both of which went through many editions in a number of languages.

With regard to Ptolemy’s Geography, Münster did not simply reprint it: he re-edited and re-illustrated it, pairing Ptolemy’s geographic framework with a substantial “modern” supplement—most notably an appendix of 48 new woodcut maps including many of parts of the world Ptolemy could not have known. Revised editions followed, and these Ptolemaic-Münster atlases became a key bridge between Renaissance reverence for classical geography and the rapidly-expanding geographic awareness of the Age of Discovery.

References
Philip Burden, The Mapping of North America, #13. William Ginsberg, Printed Maps of Scandinavia and the Arctic 1482-1601, #10