Apocalyptic Cartography: Thematic Maps and the End of the World in a Fifteenth-century Manuscript

In Apocalyptic Cartography: Thematic Maps and the End of the World in a Fifteenth-Century Manuscript, Chet Van Duzer and Ilya Dines analyse Huntington Library HM 83, an unstudied manuscript produced in Lübeck, Germany. The manuscript contains a rich collection of world maps produced by an anonymous but strikingly original cartographer. These include one of the earliest programs of thematic maps, and a remarkable series of maps that illustrate the transformations that the world was supposed to undergo during the Apocalypse. The authors supply detailed discussion of the maps and transcriptions and translations of the Latin texts that explain the maps. Copies of the maps in a fifteenth-century manuscript in Wolfenbüttel prove that this unusual work did circulate.

A brief article about this book on the website of National Geographic can be found here.

Chet Van Duzer has held research fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library and Library of Congress, and has published widely on medieval and Renaissance cartography. His book The World for a King: Pierre Desceliers’ Map of 1550 is forthcoming from the British Library.

Ilya Dines, Ph.D. (2008), Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress. He is an expert on manuscript studies, medieval encyclopedism and bestiaries, particularly Third Family bestiaries, and has published extensively in these areas.