1511 Sylvanus

These images are from Sylvanus’s 1511 edition of Ptolemy’s Geography.  

Note how closely Figure 2 resembles the second Ptolemaic projection discussed here, which appears early in the book.  See these notes  about Figure 2 from another Lehigh exhibit. 

Ptolemy held that the world was spherical (see here and here). Like the map-makers we see in this exhibit, Ptolemy dealt with the challenge of depicting the earth’s geography in two dimensions. He only knew the geography of a portion of the earth. Subsequent map-makers developed new projections that helped depict emerging discoveries from global navigation. (For a broad background on this point, see Keuning, p. 2).

These comments (scroll down) describe new features that Sylvanus added to the received Ptolemaic map. But Figure 3 displays the much more radical geographic understanding that was starting to emerge. It shows very explicitly the results of navigational explorations that were expanding knowledge of the world. The map in Figure 3 is a cordiform, that is heart-shaped, map projection.

The new geographical discoveries made even more challenging the difficulty of representing 3-dimensional geography on a two-dimensional surface. For details, see the papers in the Resources below. The cordiform was one such attempt.

The cordiform projection also lent itself to a "double cordiform" variety. These cordiform projections (single and double),  like the two hemisphere map in the exhibit page "1621 Mercator," figure 2, underscore that the known world was no longer confined to just the portion of the world that is the focus of Ptolemy’s map.

Figure 3 depicts what has been aptly described as a “new world locked in an old cage”. From the article with that title:

He [Sylvanus]…comments, “When I considered that Ptolemy, with more care than any other geographer, had determined the relative positions and distances of the places, I was astonished that his maps only occasionally corresponded to the experiences of the mariners of our time.” A. E. Nordenskiöld notes of this work,

As an edition of Ptolemy, the work of Sylvanus is quite worthless on account of the arbitrary alterations of Ptolemy’s data for longitude and latitude. … The merit, however, must be conceded to Sylvanus that he was the first to break with the blind confidence that almost every scholar in the beginning of the sixteenth century has in the atlas of the old Alexandrian geography.

Sylvanus’s plight is summarized by Adrian Johnson when he states that this “typifies the dilemma of the humanist scholar, depending on the unquestioning faith in antiquity, yet unable to reconcile this with the new mariners’ observations.”

These notes about an earlier version of the Ptolemaic map suggest a parallel with celestial maps:  "The planisphere is drawn on the basis of Ptolemy's second projection, which posits a geometrical approach similar to that of maps of the heavens: representation on the plane of a spherical surface." (For a discussion of the planisphere concept in relation to astronomy, see here.) For Ptolemy, astronomy and geography are closely related. The following is from James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota: 

He [Ptolemy] uses a system of coordinates, called a grid or graticule, to locate places on the earth. The grid on the earth is related to the grid in the sky that turned about the pole star, which was used in measuring latitude in the northern hemisphere. Through this combination between mapping the heavens and the earth, Ptolemy contributed to both terrestrial and celestial mapping, and reinforced the importance of astronomy to geography. He was the first writer to employ the terms "latitude" and "longitude" in his mapping.

In this vein, see the comments about "cosmography" elsewhere in this exhibit.

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Fig. 1: Title page

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Fig. 2: Ptolemaic map

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Fig. 3  Sylvanus's Mappe Munde

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES: