1552 MÃœNSTER, S. - Two early panoramic views of Vienna on a text page.

A wood block printed early panoramic view of Vienna (Austria). From the 1552 Latin text edition of Münster's Cosmographia, which is a short and complete summary of Renaissance knowledge.

Sebastian Münster was born in Nieder-Ingelheim, near Mainz, on 20th January 1488, the son of Andreas Münster. In 1505, he joined the Franciscan Order, and four years later was sent to the monastery of St. Katherina in Rufach. There, he studied under Konrad Pelikan, who would have a great influence on the young man over the next five years. Pelikan was a teacher of Hebrew, Greek, mathematics and cosmography.

In 1529, Munster settled in Basle, where he was to spend the rest of his life. In 1540, Münster's edition of Ptolemy appeared, illustrated with 48 woodcut maps, the standard Ptolemaic corpus supplemented by a number of new maps, of great significance for the mapping of Europe.

Having completed the Geographia, Münster returned to his pet project, the description of Germany. In 1544, he published the first edition of the Cosmographia, a summary both of Munster's own geographical researches and those of his many correspondents. The Cosmographia, with its later expanded editions, was as close as Munster would come to fulfilling the vision of 1528.

The Cosmographia was very much in the illustrative tradition of Hartmann Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle, bringing together many of the modern maps from the Geographia, additional maps that had come to him in the intervening years, as well as several hundred woodcuts printed set in the text. Again, the Cosmographia was frequently reprinted. In the 1550 edition, additions included numerous town prospects.

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Sebastian Münster (20 January 1488 - 26 May 1552)

He is known for:

• His early maps of Germany. From the late 1520s, he surveyed and mapped the German lands, relying on friends and local scholars for data.
• Ptolemy's Geographia (Basel, 1540). An edition that combined the classical Ptolemaic maps with new maps of the modern world, showing the continents as they were then understood.
• The Cosmographia (first edition 1544). 

He is best known for his Cosmographia
First published in German in Basel by Heinrich Petri in 1544, the Cosmographia described every known region of the world: its geography, peoples, customs, history, natural wonders, and cities. Münster gathered material from classical and contemporary authors and also asked scholars, officials and travelers across Europe to contribute descriptions and views of their own regions, an early example of crowd-sourced scholarship. The work was extraordinarily successful. The book appeared in more than forty editions between 1544 and 1650, in German, Latin, French, Italian, Czech and an abridged English version. His successors later enlarged editions, so the book's content changed considerably over the century.