Conclusion

In the Cosmographia, Sebastian Münster created a universal geography, and joined to it a history which brought all the empires of man into a single meaningful progression. To this he added ethnographic information, and descriptions of all created things above and below the earth. In so doing, he offered a proto-encyclopaedia, an almanac which served the needs of all professions and the interests of his readers; it was the ‘first modern, but at the same time popular’ cosmography. ¹ Münster’s contribution arrived at a time in which the ancient family of traditions and genres which sought to describe and depict the world were enjoying tremendous popularity: not merely in the sense of their voracious consumption by the literate public, but also their widespread and enthusiastic practice. Amidst the numerous interpretations of the genre and of the many works published, Münster’s long-lived and widely-disseminated cosmography seems to have struck an especial chord with the tastes and interests of the age. The content of the Cosmographia was vast, ambitious not just because of the range of topics and volume of information, but also because Münster sought to reconcile all of these things with one another in a single scheme of meaning.