1552 La Description d Affricque Selon les Divers Pais, Animaux & Monstres Horribles
DESCRIPTION
This intriguing woodcut map, of Africa, was published in the French edition of Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographie universelle, the most widely read geographic work of the sixteenth century. Issued in Basel in the early 1550s, the map reflects Münster’s ambition to present a comprehensive description of the known world by synthesizing classical authorities, medieval tradition, and early modern travel accounts.
Africa is shown extending from the Mediterranean Sea southward to the Oceanus meridionalis, with regions labeled according to classical and medieval nomenclature. Notably, the map does not depict a navigable waterway around the southern tip of Africa, despite the Portuguese rounding of the Cape of Good Hope in the late fifteenth century. The Nile River dominates the interior, flowing northward from the legendary Mountains of the Moon (Montes Lunae), a long-standing cartographic convention inherited from Ptolemy. Inland kingdoms such as Regnu Melli, Nubia, and Aethiopia are prominently named, while mountain chains are rendered pictorially rather than to scale. Coastal outlines are simplified, and vast interior spaces reflect the limited first-hand European knowledge of sub-Saharan Africa at the time.
On the verso, the sheet features a striking woodcut illustration depicting African wildlife and imagined creatures, including elephants, lions, serpents, and a unicorn as well as other exotic animals amid lush vegetation. This image corresponds directly to the chapter title’s promise to describe Africa “selon les divers pays, animaux & monstres horribles.” Together, the map and verso illustration exemplify Münster’s holistic approach to cosmography, blending geography, natural history, and ethnographic imagination. The work underscores how sixteenth-century Europeans conceptualized Africa as both a place of real kingdoms and landscapes and a land shaped by wonder, abundance, and myth.
CONDITION
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