Edinburgh from Cosmographia by Sebastian Muenster
Edinburgh – Cosmographia
Very interesting woodblock sheet from the 1570 German edition of Sebastian Muenster’s Cosmographie shows images of Edinburgh, Scottland.
Page size: Around 9 X 14 inches
Condition: Some light browing and discoloration, a few faint spots as shown.
Sebastian Münster, (January 20, 1488 – May 26, 1552) wrote and illustrated the first German description of the world in his work Cosmographia published in 1544 and richly illustrated with detailed woodblock prints, some of which were drawn by the great artists of the period including Hans Holbein the Younger and Urs Graf.
Born in Ingelheim, the son of farmers he entered the Franciscan order and studied at the University of Tübingen in 1518. He later became a Lutheran. An professor of Hebrew, he was the first German to produce an edition of the Hebrew Bible.
His other works include Mappa Europae (1536). In a Rabbinical translation of the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew, a Latin edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia with illustrations, Novae lnsulae XXVI Nova Tabula (1552) and Rudimenta Mathematica (1551)
He died in Basel of the plague in 1552.
Below – Reverse of the sheet