Recognizing early modern cartographers as significant agents in the intellectual history of the Atlantic, Mapping an Atlantic World, circa 1500 includes around 50 beautiful and illuminating historical maps.

Concerns a collection of maps and associated documents claimed to be from Marco Polo's time or that of his daughters (as many of the maps have the name or one or another of the three daughters on them). Discusses provenance, authenticity, and history of the documents, known to scholars as "the Marco Polo Maps" since 1948, here discussed fully for the first time.

This open access book presents the first detailed study of one of the most important masterpieces of Renaissance cartography, Martin Waldseemüller’s Carta marina of 1516. By transcribing, translating into English, and detailing the sources of all of the descriptive texts on the map, as well as the sources of many of the images, the book makes the map available to scholars in a wholly unprecedented way. In addition, the book provides revealing insights into how Waldseemüller went about making the map -- information that can’t be found in any other source. The Carta marina is the result of Waldseemüller’s radical re-evaluation of what a world map should be; he essentially started from scratch when he created it, rejecting the Ptolemaic model and other sources he had used in creating his 1507 map, and added more descriptive texts and a wealth of illustrations. Given its content, the book offers an essential reference work not only on this map, but also for anyone working in sixteenth-century European cartography.

Each of the maps featured in this book was showcased in the exhibition “Canada before Confederation: Early Exploration and Mapping,” which took place in several locations, both in Canada and abroad, in Fall of 2017. The authors provide a scholarly study highlighting the importance and unique features of each of these jewels of cartographic history, with particular attention paid to how they demonstrate the development of Canadian identity at the same time that they reveal Indigenous knowledge of the lands now known as Canada.

Preface1. Introduction: Maps of Preliterate Peoples2. Maps of Classical Antiquity3. Early Maps of East and South Asia4. Cartography in Europe and Islam in the Middle Ages5. The Rediscovery of Ptolemy and Cartography in Renaissance Europe6. Cartography in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment7. Diversification and Development in the Nineteenth Century8. Modern Cartography: Official and Quasi-Official Maps9. Modern Cartography: Private and Institutional MapsAppendix A: Selected Map ProjectionsAppendix B: Short List of IsogramsAppendix C: GlossaryNotesIllustration SourcesIndex Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.