Print and Discovery

History of Maps and Cartography

Course 1 · Chapter 4 · Printing and the Age of Discovery

Printing changed maps from rare, hand-copied objects into things that could be made in hundreds of copies and corrected edition by edition. At the same time, voyages across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans sent a flood of new information back to Europe, and mapmakers had to decide how much of it to believe. This chapter follows the new maps, the first use of the name "America", and the Dutch atlases of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Names and dates are from general knowledge and flagged "check".

Ptolemy in Print

Translation

A Latin translation of Ptolemy's Geography was made in Italy in the early fifteenth century (check), bringing the idea of coordinates back to Latin Europe.

First printed editions

Printed editions with maps appeared in the 1470s, in Bologna and Rome, and later in Ulm, which was among the first to use woodcuts, while engraved plates were used in Italy (check the order).

New maps added

Later editions added "modern maps" of regions the ancient text did not describe, a sign that Ptolemy was becoming a starting point, not the last word (check).

Naming America

Item (check each)	Detail
Columbus, 1492	Sailed west from Spain expecting to reach Asia. Educated people already knew the Earth was round, and the dispute was over its size. Columbus argued for a smaller Earth than most scholars (check).
Waldseemüller map, 1507	A large printed world map made in the Duchy of Lorraine (at Saint-Dié) with the name "America" placed on the southern continent, after Amerigo Vespucci's first name (check).
Library of Congress	The one surviving copy of the 1507 wall map is held by the Library of Congress in Washington (check).
Later change	Waldseemüller dropped the name from his later maps, but by then it had spread (check).

Not a new world map in one step Maps of the Americas were revised again and again as voyages added coastlines, and as pilots' secret charts were copied, bought and sometimes stolen. States such as Portugal and Spain kept master charts, the padrón real in Spain, and tried to restrict who saw them (check names). The new picture of the world came from competing reports, not a single survey.

Mercator, Ortelius and the Atlas

Gerard Mercator (1512–1594), a Flemish mapmaker, made a world map in 1569 on a new projection for navigators (Chapter 5), and also gave the word "atlas" to a bound collection of maps, published after his death (check).
Abraham Ortelius published the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum in 1570, often called the first modern atlas, with maps of uniform size, each backed by a list of sources (check).
Blaeu family. Dutch publishers in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century produced very large, richly decorated atlases (check).
Hondius, Jansson and others competed in the same market, and plates were sold, reused and copied (check).
The business. An atlas was a prestige object as well as a reference work, and a map's decoration could help to sell it.

What Changed

Before print	After print (check)
Each copy drawn by hand, with copying errors	Identical copies from one plate, with corrections made in new states of the plate
Few readers saw a map	Merchants, officials and the educated public could own one
A map stayed with its maker's authority	A printed map carried a publisher's name and was open to criticism
Secrecy was easier to keep	Publication spread knowledge and made secrets harder to keep

For the voyages themselves, see the course The Age of Exploration. This course keeps to the maps those voyages produced.

A British comparison Christopher Saxton's county maps of England and Wales, surveyed in the 1570s and published as an atlas in 1579, are an early national atlas in Britain, and are often described as the first of their kind for the country (check). John Speed's later county maps are widely reproduced and are probably the old maps most Britons have seen on a wall.

Check the details The story that Columbus "proved the Earth was round" is a myth: the debate concerned the distance to Asia. Details of who first used a name or a technique on a map are often disputed, so verify claims about "firsts" with the holding library.

Exercises

Exercise 1

Explain how the disagreement over the Earth's size shaped the case for Columbus's voyage.

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Exercise 2

List three ways that printing changed what a map could do, and one thing that stayed the same.

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Exercise 3

Choose an old county map of your own area, from a library's online collection, and list what it shows, what it copies from earlier maps and what appears to be new.

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Quick Reference

Print: Ptolemy in the 1470s, many copies, corrections
1507: Waldseemüller map names America (check)
Atlas: Ortelius 1570, Mercator's collection, Blaeu
Britain: Saxton 1579, Speed
Debate: the size of the Earth, not its shape