The World According to Urbano Monte: A Full Translation and Critical Examination of Urbano Monte’s 1587 Cosmography($20.00Value)

Description

Completed in 1587, Urbano Monte’s World Map is one of the most ambitious cartographic works of the Renaissance—an enormous circular planisphere composed of sixty individual sheets, combining geographic detail with theological vision, classical learning, and cosmographic wonder. Monte, a Milanese nobleman and scholar, envisioned the map not simply as a record of worldly geography, but as a sacred image of creation itself—uniting the heavens and the Earth, myth and measurement, known lands and imagined realms. This volume offers the first fully integrated presentation of Monte’s map in English: a quadrant-by-quadrant translation of its scrolls and perimeter texts, detailed analysis of its illustrations and symbolic geometry, and a contextual study of the sources—classical, Islamic, Christian, oral, and nautical—that informed its creation. With commentary on the map’s creatures, margins, cosmology, and cartographic structure, the book guides the reader through Monte’s world not only as a geographical document but as a worldview—a lens into the intellectual and spiritual imagination of the late sixteenth century. Bridging the domains of history, theology, geography, and Renaissance thought, The World According to Urbano Monte invites the modern reader to recover a forgotten vision of Earth as sacred, unfinished, and full of mystery.