Henricus Martellus’s World Map at Yale (c. 1491)

Chet Van Duzer is a David Rumsey Research Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library and a board member of the Lazarus Project at the University of Rochester, which brings multispectral imaging to cultural institutions around the world. He has also held research fellowships at the Library of Congress, the Huntington Library, the Clements Library, and Princeton University Library. He has published extensively on medieval and Renaissance maps in journals such as Imago Mundi, Terrae Incognitae, Word & Image, and Viator. He is the author of Johann Schöner's Globe of 1515: Transcription and Study, the first detailed analysis of one of the earliest surviving terrestrial globes that includes the New World; and (with John Hessler) Seeing the World Anew: The Radical Vision of Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 & 1516 World Maps. His book Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps was published in 2013 by the British Library, and is now available in German and Russian editions, with a Chinese edition on the way. In 2014 the Library of Congress published a study of Christopher Columbus's Book of Privileges which he co-authored with John Hessler and Daniel De Simone. His book The World for a King: Pierre Desceliers' Map of 1550 was published at the end of 2015 by the British Library, and in 2016 Brill published a book he co-authored with Ilya Dines, Apocalyptic Cartography: Thematic Maps and the End of the World in a Fifteenth-Century Manuscript. His current NEH project is a study of the annotations in a heavily annotated copy of the 1525 edition of Ptolemy's Geography.

Acknowledgements.- Preface.- 1 Henricus Martellus and his Works.- 2 The Legends on the Yale Martellus Map.- 3 Toponyms in Arabia, Syria, and Mesopotamia.- 4 Toponyms on the Western and Southern Coasts of Africa.- 5 Southern Africa and the Egyptus novelo maps.- 6 The Influence of the Yale Martellus Map.- 7 Conclusions.- Appendix A: Equipment and Techniques Used in the Multispectral Imaging of the Yale Martellus Map, by Roger Easton, Gregory Heyworth, and Kenneth Boydston.- Appendix B: Supplementary Images.

"This first overall study of Martellus's map provides new findings solidly established and focuses on the Martellus figure hitherto poorly known." (Patrick Gautier Dalché, Aethiopica, Vol. 22, 2019)