Die erst general. Die Erste Landtafel begreifft in sich der ganzen Erdkugel umkreiß

Sebastian Münster was a German humanist, Hebraist, cosmographer, and mapmaker based in Basel. His Cosmographia, first published in German in 1544, was a large illustrated description of the known world, combining geography, history, peoples, cities, natural wonders, and maps. Münster died in 1552, but the work continued to be revised and reissued by the Petri publishing family in Basel.

In 1588, Sebastian Petri issued a substantially revised version of the Cosmographia with a new set of woodcut maps. This world map, from the 1592 German edition, belongs to that later Petri revision. It is therefore not one of Münster’s original mid-sixteenth-century world maps, but a later map made for the updated Cosmographia, reflecting geographical knowledge of the later sixteenth century. The map presents the world in an oval projection framed by ornamental corner panels and German text above and below. Its geography is much more closely aligned with the Ortelian world map tradition than Münster’s earlier Typus orbis universalis (#91 and #90). North America is broader and more recognisable, though still marked by uncertainty, including the large inland sea often associated with the so-called Verrazzano Sea. South America is more fully developed, and Magellan’s ship Victoria appears in the Pacific, recalling the first circumnavigation of 1519–22.

The southern hemisphere is dominated by Terra Australis non dum cognita. South of Java, the protruding peninsula bearing Beach, Lucach, and Maletur preserves names derived from Marco Polo’s travel account and later European attempts to fit those names into the imagined geography of the far south. New Guinea appears separately to the east, while the southern continent stretches across the lower part of the map and includes Magellanica Regio near the Strait of Magellan.

Within the collection, this map is closely connected with Münster’s earlier modern world maps (91and 90), which show a different, earlier stage in his printed world geography.