The Age of Discovery and Mapping the New World

Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 map, the Universalis Cosmographia, produced in the small Lorraine town of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges together with the humanist scholar Matthias Ringmann, was the first printed map to apply the name "America" to the newly encountered continent, in honor of the Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci. Vespucci's published accounts of his voyages, the Mundus Novus (1503) and the more widely disseminated but disputed Lettera (1504), had argued, against the view still held by Columbus himself, that the lands reached across the Atlantic constituted an entirely new continent rather than the eastern edge of Asia. The map's only surviving copy, a twelve-sheet wall map roughly 1.28 by 2.33 meters when assembled, was purchased by the United States Library of Congress in 2003 for ten million dollars.