![]() ![]() ![]() Histories of New World discovery have long told us that it was only in 1513-after Vasco Núñez de Balboa had first caught sight of the Pacific by looking west from a mountain peak in Panama-that Europeans began to conceive of the New World as something other than a part of Asia. "It is found," the author wrote, "to be surrounded on all sides by the ocean." Most significant, it depicted the New World in a dramatically new way. It had been based on several sources: a brand-new letter by Amerigo Vespucci (included in the Introduction to Cosmography) the work of the second-century Alexandrian geographer Claudius Ptolemy and charts of the regions of the western Atlantic newly explored by Vespucci, Columbus and others. It had been printed on several sheets, the author noted, suggesting that it was unusually large. Various remarks made in passing throughout the book implied that this map was extraordinary. ![]() The globe, certainly, I have limited in size. In an easy-to-miss paragraph printed on the back of a foldout diagram, the author wrote, "The purpose of this little book is to write a sort of introduction to the whole world that we have depicted on a globe and on a flat surface. Those who began studying the book soon noticed something else mysterious. With no fanfare, near the end of a minor Latin treatise on cosmography, a nameless 16th-century author briefly stepped out of obscurity to give America its name-and then disappeared again. Since both Asia and Africa received their names from women, I do not see why anyone should rightly prevent this from being called Amerigen-the land of Amerigo, as it were-or America, after its discoverer, Americus, a man of perceptive character." ![]() "These parts," he wrote, "have in fact now been more widely explored, and a fourth part has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci (as will be heard in what follows). It came just after he had introduced readers to Asia, Africa and Europe-the three parts of the world known to Europeans since antiquity. But near the end, in a chapter devoted to the makeup of the Earth, the author elbowed his way onto the page and made an oddly personal announcement. Each of these spheres wheeled grandly around the Earth at its own pace, in a never-ending celestial procession.Īll of this was delivered in the dry manner of a textbook. The Moon, the Sun and the planets each had their own sphere, and beyond them was the firmament, a single sphere studded with all of the stars. The author of the Introduction to Cosmography laid out the organization of the cosmos as it had been described for more than 1,000 years: the Earth sat motionless at the center, surrounded by a set of giant revolving concentric spheres. The word "cosmography" isn't used much today, but educated readers in 1507 knew what it meant: the study of the known world and its place in the cosmos. Dié, a town in eastern France some 60 miles southwest of Strasbourg, in the Vosges Mountains of Lorraine. But a printer's mark recorded that it had been published in 1507, in St. The book-known today as the Cosmographiae Introductio, or Introduction to Cosmography-listed no author. One hundred and three pages long and written in Latin, it announced itself on its title page as follows:Ī GLOBE AND A FLAT SURFACE WITH THE INSERTION When a few copies began resurfacing, in the 18th century, nobody knew what to make of it. ![]()
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