Cosmographer and Hebrew scholar
Sebastian Münster
The Basel professor whose Cosmographia showed the world to sixteenth-century readers.
On Picturepops™ cards · 1
The life
1488–1552Born Nieder-Ingelheim, Germany
Sebastian Münster was a Franciscan friar who became a Protestant and a professor of Hebrew at the University of Basel. His Cosmographia of 1544, a vast illustrated description of the world in German, went through more than twenty editions and was filled with woodcut maps and town views. Our card, Augsburg Town Hall and Perlach Tower, opens onto an old bird’s-eye view of the walled city from his work.