BIBLIOS

Document type
Journal articles

Document subtype
Full paper

Title
Manuskriptkarten im Umfeld von Vadians Lehrtätigkeit in Wien

Participants in the publication
Thomas Horst (Author)
Dep. História e Filosofia das Ciências
CIUHCT
Chet van Duzer (Author)
Rudolf Gamper (Author)
Florian Mittenhuber (Author)

Summary
In the first decades of the sixteenth century, geography\nand cartography were valued sciences in Vienna,\nwhere Humanism flourished. Several students of\nthe German Renaissance, including the humanist\nscholar and Neo-Latin poet Conrad Celtes\n(1459 – 1508) published geographical books and\nworked as cartographers. The basis for the study of\nmaps at this time were the Ptolemaic charts, which\nwere available in Vienna in several printed editions.\nThey also were taken as the models for the manuscript\nmaps that were bound with the 1518 edition\nof the “Scholien” of Pomponius Mela, edited by the\nVienna humanist Joachim Vadian (1483 / 84 –1551)\nfrom St. Gall, Switzerland. Until now only eight copies\nof this edition that include these manuscript\nmap-cimelia (containing 26 sheets) are known\nworldwide.\nSome of these manuscript maps were mentioned\noccasionally since the late eighteenth century, but\nthey have not been analyzed until the authors of this\npaper (independently of each other and with different\ninterests) gave attention to that corpus in recent\nyears. Florian Mittenhuber (as member of the\n“Ptolemaios-Forschungsstelle” at Berne University)\ncame across to the copies in St. Gall while studying\nthe manuscript tradition of Latin maps of Ptolemy’s\nGeography. Afterwards, these copies have been\nanalyzed and interpreted by Thomas Horst. The former\nlibrarian of the “Vadianische Sammlung” in\nSt. Gall, Rudolf Gamper, concentrated on Vadian’s\nbiography. And Chet Van Duzer discovered further\ncopies in Chicago, Ljubljana and Paris; he also has\nstudied in particular the diverse hand-colouring of\nthese manuscript maps.\nThis paper deals primarily with the copies preserved\nin Swiss libraries. The basis of these manuscript\nmaps was the atlas by Waldseemüller in the 1513\nedition of Ptolemy’s Geography. The manuscript\nmaps were created in the periphery of the teaching\nactivity by Joachim Vadian at Vienna University.\nWith the help of different documents and indications,\nthe context of their genesis can be reconstructed.\nFrom the same environment originated\ntwo further, so-long rarely considered introductions\nto geography and cosmography, which only are\navailable as manuscripts: these are the “Introductoria”\nby Joachim Vadian and Sebastian Bunderl,\nwhich are picked out as central theme with their index\nand tradition here at the end. An excursus on\nthe cosmographical work by Pomponius Mela and a\ndetailed description of all the copies preserved in\nSwiss libraries complete this paper.


Where published
Cartographica Helvetica

Publication Identifiers



Keywords
Pomponius Mela Joachim von Watt Vadian Manuscript Maps Vienna Binderlius Ptolemy