GRYNÆUS.
Fac-simile of cut in Reusner’s Icones (Strasburg, 1590), p. 107.
As illustrating in some sort his more labored work, the Opus epistolarum Petri Martyris was first printed at Complutum in 1530.[164] The letters were again published at Amsterdam, in 1670,[165] in an edition which had the care of Ch. Patin, to which was appended other letters by Fernando del Pulgar.[166]
The most extensive of the early collections was the Novus orbis, which was issued in separate editions at Basle and Paris in 1532. Simon Grynæus, a learned professor at Basle, signed the preface; and it usually passes under his name. Grynæus was born in Swabia, was a friend of Luther, visited England in 1531, and died in Basle, in 1541. The compilation, however, is the work of a canon of Strasburg, John Huttich (born about 1480; died, 1544), but the labor of revision fell on Grynæus.[167] It has the first three voyages of Columbus, and those of Pinzon and Vespucius; the rest of the book is taken up with the travels of Marco Polo and his successors to the East.[168] It next appeared in a German translation at Strasburg in 1534, which was made by Michal Herr, Die New Welt. It has no map, gives more from Martyr than the other edition, and substitutes a preface by Herr for that of Grynæus.[169] The original Latin was reproduced at Basle again in 1537, with 1536 in the colophon.[170] In 1555 another edition was printed at Basle, enlarged upon the 1537 edition by the insertion of the second and third of the Cortes letters and some accounts of efforts in converting the Indians.[171] Those portions relating to America exclusively were reprinted in the Latin at Rotterdam in 1616.[172]
Sebastian Münster, who was born in 1489, was forty-three years old when his map of the world—which is preserved in the Paris (1532) edition of the Novus orbis—appeared. This is the first time that Münster significantly comes before us as a describer of the geography of the New World. Again in 1540 and 1542 he was associated with the editions of Ptolemy issued at Basle in those years.[173] It is, however, upon his Cosmographia, among his forty books, that Münster’s fame chiefly rests. The earliest editions are extremely rare, and seem not to be clearly defined by the bibliographers. It appears to have been originally issued in German, probably in 1544 at Basle,[174] under the mixed title: Cosmographia. Beschreibūg aller lender Durch Sebastianum Munsterum. Getruckt zü Basel durch Henrichum Petri, Anno MDxliiij.[175] He says that he had been engaged upon it for eighteen years, keeping Strabo before him as a model. To the section devoted to Asia he adds a few pages “Von den neüwen inseln” (folios dcxxxv-dcxlij).
MÜNSTER.
Fac-simile of the cut in the Ptolemy of 1552.