Monsters Traveling from Map to Book: An Unexpected Journey

“Monsters Traveling from Map to Book: An Unexpected Journey” CHET VAN DUZER (The Lazarus Project at the University of Rochester) The idea of cartographers using books as sources for their maps is a familiar one, and some cartographers—such as Martin Waldseemüller in his Carta marina of 1516—list the books they used in compiling their maps. In this talk I will examine three cases in which information traveled in the other direction: the authors of books used maps as their sources for monsters. First I will show that the monstrous races of men in two bestiaries of the so-called the B-Is family came from an early mappamundi. Second, Jacques de Vitry in his early thirteenth-century Historia orientalis says that one of his sources for the monstrous races of India was a mappamundi. And finally, Conrad Gesner in his Historiae animalium(Zurich, 1551) used a map by the Swedish clergyman Olaus Magnus titled Carta marina, printed in 1539. These cases show that maps could play an unexpected role in the intermingling between maps and literature. From “The Intermingling of Cartography and Literature in the Early Modern Period, ” a CMRS-CEGS Conference, organized by Chet Van Duzer (Lazarus Project, University of Rochester) and Stephen P. McCormick (Romance Languages, Washington & Lee University). Recorded May 5, 2023.