A fine copy in its contemporary original binding

MÜNSTER, Sebastian.

Cosmographia, das ist: Beschreibung der gantzen Welt: darinnen aller Monarchien Keyserthumben Königreichen Fürstenthumben Graff- und Herrschafften Länderen Stätten und Gemeinden; wie auch aller geistlichen Stifften Bisthumben Abteyen Klöstern Ursprung Regiment Reichthumb Gewalt und Macht Verenderung Auff- und Abnehmen zu Fried- und Kriegszeiten sampt aller ubrigen Beschaffenheit.

Basel: Sebastian Henricpetri, 1628.

Hardcover. Very Good. Item #004104

Folio (379 x 237 mm). [14] leaves (including engraved title), 26 double-page maps, 1752 (i.e. 1748) pages. Pages 1206-9 omitted, pp. 1039-41 should be 1039-[43]. Blank leaf ):(8 present. Letterpress title printed in red and black; engraved additional title by M. Merian, 26 double-page woodcut maps, numerous other woodcut illustrations, views and maps in-text, including many double-page and one large folding showing Heidelberg. Contemporary blind-stamped pigskin over wooden boards, brass bosses, clasps, and catch-plates, blue-dyed edges. Text browned as usual, minor spotting in places, a few clean tears to lower blank margin, repaired tear w/o loss at top of p-1039/40, p.1737/8 torn at blank fore-margin away from text, several pages still uncut at bottom, occasional dust- and finger soiling. Provenance: Johann Hermann (1738-1800), French naturalist and doctor ("Bibliotheca Hermanniana" inscription on flyleaf)*. ----

A fine copy in its contemporary original binding, of the last German edition of the Cosmography, "the first modern" work of geography (Hodgen, p. 506). This, the most extensive of all the editions of Münster's great work, contains 68 maps and plans published here for the first time.
Münster was a cartographer, historian, and linguist who combined his expertise to create this tour-de-force work, which "brought all the empires of man into a single meaningful progression . . . [and] this single thread of history he married to geography, so that each should mirror and illuminate the other" (McLean).
"Münster's first major contribution to geography dates from 1540, the year of the publication of his Latin translation of Ptolemy's Geography, illustrated with maps of his own design. Having addressed an appeal in 1528 'to all lovers of the joyful art of geography to help him in a true and correct description of the German nation,' he spent fifteen years collecting up-to-date information on Germany and adjacent lands and in 1544 published his most important work, Cosmographei, 'a description of the whole world and everything in it.' This book set a new standard in the field, diverging widely from such earlier works as Gregor Reisch's Margarita philosophica (1496) and following both a regional and an encyclopedic approach. The work ran to 660 pages in the first edition and to nearly twice as many in later editions; its most valuable parts are those dealing with Germany and Central Europe, as well as the illustrations and maps, the latter drawn by Münster himself . . . The Cosmographei was among the most popular treatises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: forty-six editions, in six languages, were published prior to 1650" (DSB). "To the historian of ideas, Münster's Cosmography is a great and lasting interest. Although written so long after the earliest exploration, it reproduces the vast and credulous wonder of the pre-Columbian European mentality, and some of the mediaeval folklore, still current concerning strange and distant, peoples" (Hodgen, p. 528). Although this book appears with some regularity on the market, complete copies in such fine condition as ours are rare.
* In 1769 Hermann was appointed professor of medicine at the School of Public Health of Strasbourg, then, in 1778, professor of philosophy, before going on, in 1784, to succeed Jacob Reinbold Spielmann as chair of chemistry, natural history and materia medica. In 1794 he became professor of botany and materia medica in the new School of Medicine. He was the author of Tabula affinitatum animalium (1783) and Observationes zoologicae quibus novae complures, published posthumously in 1804. His collections and library of 18,000 volumes formed the basis of the Natural History Museum of Strasbourg, where a reconstruction of his natural history cabinet was opened in 1988.
References & Bibliography: DSB IX, pp. 580-81; Burmeister 86; Nordenskiöld collection 2, 159; Sabin 51396. Hodgen, Sebastian Muenster (1489-1552): A Sixteenth-Century Ethnographer, Osiris 11 (1954), pp. 504-529. McLean, The Cosmographia of Sebastian Münster: Describing the World in the Reformation, 2007.

Price: 17,500 €  *  convert currency