Samuel Purchas: Peregrinatio Paul
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Cartographer:
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Samuel Purchas
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Title:
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Peregrinatio Paul
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Date:
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1625
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Published:
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London
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Width:
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8 inches / 21 cm
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Height:
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5 inches / 13 cm
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Map ref:
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MED2274
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Description:
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Early map of the eastern Mediterranean from Sicily to the Levant showing the travels of St. Paul. Published in Hakluytus Posthomous or Purchas his Pilgrimis, contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells, by Englishmen and others (1625), a four-volume compendium of travelogues by early and contemporary explorers. The work had been started by the noted English historian Richard Hakluyt, but remained unfinished upon his death in 1616. Samuel Purchas, a cleric and writer, inherited Hakluyt’s extensive notes and merged them with stories he had collected first-hand from sailors returning from distant lands to create one of the great works about European exploration.
This map, like most of the maps in Purchas’s work, is copied directly from Jodocus Hondius’s pocket edition of Gerard Mercator’s atlas. In an age when direct plagiarism was commonplace, it is unusual that Purchas credits Hondius in the upper margin. Purchas himself stated that he intentionally chose Hondius’s pocket maps as they contained no information about new discoveries that could be of value to Britain’s enemies.
Coloured. [MED2274] |