Universalis Cosmographia

Waldseemüller map

1507

The Waldseemüller map or Universalis Cosmographia ("Universal Cosmography") is a printed wall map of the world by German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, originally published in April 1507. It is known as the first map to use the name "America". The name America is placed on what is now called South America on the main map. As explained in Cosmographiae Introductio, the name was bestowed in honor of the Italian Amerigo Vespucci.

The map is drafted on a modification of Ptolemy's second projection, expanded to accommodate the Americas and the high latitudes.^[1] A single copy of the map survives, presently housed at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Waldseemüller also created globe gores, printed maps designed to be cut out and pasted onto spheres to form globes of the Earth. The wall map, and his globe gores of the same date, depict the American continents in two pieces. These depictions differ from the small inset map in the top border of the wall map, which shows the two American continents joined by an isthmus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldseem%C3%BCller_map

A Map of the Entire World According to the Traditional Method of Ptolemy and Corrected with Other Lands of Amerigo VespucciMartin Waldseemüller's 1507 world map was the first map to depict a separate Western hemisphere with the Pacific as a separate ocean. The map grew out of an ambitious project in Saint-Dié, Lorraine (in present-day France), during the early 1500s, to document and update new geographic knowledge derived from the Portuguese and Spanish explorations of the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Waldseemüller's map was the most exciting product of that research effort. It drew upon data gathered during Amerigo Vespucci's 1501-02 voyages to the New World. In recognition of Vespucci's understanding that a new continent had been discovered, Waldseemüller christened the new lands "America." This is the only known surviving copy of the first edition of the map, of which it is believed 1,000 copies were printed. By showing the newly-found American land mass, the map represented a huge leap forward in knowledge – one that forever changed the European understanding of a world previously divided into just three parts: Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Library of Congress

Universalis cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei traditionem et Americi Vespucii aliorū que lustrationes

https://www.loc.gov/item/2003626426/

"Cosmographiae Introductio" by Martin Waldseemuller and Mathias Ringmann - Bookworm History

BookwormHistory

Published on Jan 26, 2014

Episode 4: On maps, forgeries, and what really is in a name This episode's book is the Cosmographie Introductio, published by the Gymnasium Vosagense, most likely written by Mathias Ringmann, as companion to the Waldseemuller Map of 1507. I barely scratched the surface of the wonderful and complicated stories of Amerigo Vespucci, the Universalis Cosmographia, and how the New World came to be called "America". For more information (and just a really great read) I would highly recommend "The Fourth Part of the World" by Toby Lester. If you're interested in Vespucci himself "Amerigo" by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is a good source for trying to peel away some of the mystery surrounding this enigmatic character. A facsimile copy of the translated "Cosmographiae Introductio can be found on the Internet Archives at https://archive.org/details/cosmograp... and physical copies can be found with a little digging.

The Waldseemüller Map: Charting the New WorldTwo obscure 16th-century German scholars named the American continent and changed the way people thought about the world