Munster, Sebastian

Sebastian Münster (1488-1552) was one of the leading cartographers of the sixteenth century. His two major works, Ptolemy's Geographia (1540-1552) and Cosmographia Universalis (1544-1628), printed from woodblocks, were published in Basel by his step-son, Henri Petri, with editions continuing after Münster's death of the plague. Cosmographia, which included views of prominent towns and cities in Germany and elsewhere, was the earliest description of the world in the German language, and one of the most popular works of the 16th century, extending to over 40 editions in several languages. Unusually, much of the content had been crowdsourced through an appeal to other scholars for descriptions of such places, an appeal which had included instructions on how to map their localities. Münster was the first cartographer to publish separate maps of each of the four known continents - Asia, Europe, Africa and America. Published within Cosmographia, "Tabula novarum insularum" is credited as the first map to show the American continents as geographically discrete.