M. McLean, The Cosmographia of Sebastian Münster (Carl Philipp Emanuel Nothaft)

• Text
• Metadata
• PDF

Francia-Recensio 2009/3 Frühe Neuzeit – Revolution – Empire (1500–1815)

Matthew McLean, The Cosmographia of Sebastian Münster. Describing the World in the Reformation, Aldershot, Hampshire (Ashgate Publishing) 2007, VIII–378 p., 30 ill. (St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History), ISBN 978-0-7546-5843-6, GBP 60,00.

rezensiert von/compte rendu rédigé par

Carl Philipp Emanuel Nothaft, Munich

With 35 editions in five languages, published between 1544 and 1628, the monumental »Cosmographia« from the pen of the German humanist Sebastian Münster stands as one of the most widespread and influential books of the Reformation period. Offering hundreds of lavish woodcuts, dozens of state-of-the-art maps and more than one thousand folio-pages brimming with geographical, historical and ethnographical information on virtually every region, tribe and nation then known to Europeans, it was both an ambitious piece of scholarship and a clever example of entrepreneurial printing, which aimed at a wide audience, making it a valuable mirror of sixteenth-century reading tastes and the availability of information on the world to the non-scholarly reader. Yet while its comprehensiveness was certainly one of its main selling points at the time, the sheer size of Münster’s book has long tended to discourage modern research into the »Cosmographia«. Under these circumstances, Matthew McLean is to be all the more applauded for having undertaken the daunting task of giving us the long overdue monographic study of this significant piece of Early Modern printing.

The bulk of McLean’s book consists of three chapters, first of which (p. 143–188) describes the work’s genesis and editorial history as well as Münster’s innovative methods in assembling the material for his project. Using Münster’s correspondence as well as the »Cosmographia« itself, McLean sheds light on how the Baslean Hebraist collected his information both through personal expeditions along the Rhine and his epistolary contacts to scholars, princes and churchmen throughout Europe, who furnished him with maps, descriptions and documents for their respective cities and regions.

The following chapters acquaint the reader in some detail with the organization, topics and content of the »Cosmographia« (p. 189–279) before examining the underlying worldview, which Münster transported through his descriptions of man and his environment (p. 281–339). The »Cosmographia« is deftly characterized as a »moralised geography« (p. 282) in the tradition of the medieval mappa mundi, which invests much space in highlighting the role of God’s providence in history and in celebrating man’s industry and ability to cultivate the land he lives on (p. 312–339). As others before him, McLean plausibly suggests that the »Cosmographia«, in its function as a »book of the world«, is best understood as a companion piece to Scripture (the main object of Münster’s work as a Hebraist) in its author’s wide-ranging effort to know God through his works (p. 337–339).

For the most part, McLeans’s style of writing is clear, vivid and commendably jargon-free, as he intersperses the narrative with well-chosen and sometimes delightful examples and quotations, which succeed in maintaining the reader’s attention even in the more evolved sections of his narrative. As one would expect, most of the presentation is based on a single source, the »Cosmographia« in its »definitive« 1550 Latin edition, and relatively few attempts are made to further elucidate or contextualize the claims encountered therein. This is quite understandable, considering the sheer mass of primary material the author had to overcome, yet in certain instances some additional information would have been appropriate, as in the case of »the tale of the crippled son of a nobleman, dubbed ›Contractus‹, who was shut away in a monastery« (p. 299), where he wrote many learned books and died around 1050. To the uninformed reader, McLean’s wording would suggest that the person’s existence is of doubtful historicity, although Münster was clearly referring to the well-known medieval scholar Hermann of Reichenau.

Another source of irritation consists in the numerous repetitions, with the same basic ideas and interpretations being restated and rehashed in various introductory and conclusive sections throughout the book (and at one point even the exact same quotation from the »Cosmographia« is recycled within short range, on p. 267 and 338). The latter problem is furthered by the length of the two preliminary chapters on Münster’s biography (p. 1–44) and on the general context of sixteenth-century cosmography (p. 45–142), which together take up nearly half of the entire text. Both sections are relatively short on new information and the second chapter in particular is to a large extent based on older secondary literature (such as C. S. Lewis’s »The Discarded Image«), which may have contributed to the somewhat wooden nature of the confrontation between »medieval Weltbild« and secular, »mathematicized« sixteenth-century geography that pervades much of McLean’s account.

Given the mostly derivative character of the first 142 pages, one is inclined to ask whether this study could not have been executed more concisely. A tighter focus on the book’s main brief may have saved both printing costs and time for careful copy-editing. It is in the latter department where the book’s most conspicuous deficits lie. Pages that do not contain at least one orthographical, grammatical or syntactical error, missing spaces or an extraneous word seem to be in the minority and sometimes multiple mishaps are found in a single sentence. Even less care has been invested in providing a tidy and consistent bibliographic record. In the footnotes, McLean follows no discernible method in his choice of short-titles, using an array of citation rules and variants so inconsistent as to make it difficult at times to figure out which book or essay is meant. Confusion also abounds in the bibliography, where it can happen that a title appears twice in the same section, first as (p. 352) Erwin, I. J., Sebastian Münster’s knowledge and use of Jewish exegesis. Festival Studies in Honor of the Chief Rabi Dr. J. J. Hertz (1942) and later on (p. 354) as Rosenthal, Erwin I. J., Sebastian Muenster’s Knowledge and Use of Jewish Exegesis, in: Joseph Hertz, Isidore Epstein, Essays in Honour of the Very Reverend Dr. J. M. Hertz (London, 1942), p. 351–369.

Aside from the fact that McLean gets it right in neither case (the editors are I. Epstein, E. Levine and C. Roth), the degree of variation evident in these two references to the same title is symptomatic for a bibliography in which crucial elements, such as page references to articles, are regularly omitted and where up to four divergent ways of citing a periodical can be encountered on a single page (for instance on p. 360: »The Map Collector XXXIX (1987), p. 2–14«; »Viator. Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies, v. 31 (2000)«, »Central European History, 18 (1985)«; »The Map Collector 58 (1992), p. 2–5)«. Further examples of this kind could be supplied ad libendum and should be regarded unacceptable even by the most utilitarian account of bibliographic formalities. The impression of carelessness is furthered by the illustrations, most of which have been scanned from the author’s working-copy of the »Cosmographia«. The quality and size of the pictures is highly uneven, with most of the cityscape views turning out too dark and small as to be of much use (e. g. p. 172, 185, 201, 225, 228, 232).

Aside from the book’s poor performance on the editorial level, however, its last three chapters contain enough to recommend itself to any scholar with an interest in the intellectual history of the Reformation period.