>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. [ Pause ] >> John Cole: Well good afternoon. Welcome to the Library of Congress especially to those of you who are from outside our institution, we're glad to have you here. This is a part of the Books and Beyond series for the Center for the Book. I'm John Cole, the director of the center, which is the reading promotion arm of the Library of Congress. We're also very proud of our young reader center, which is entering into its fourth year. We are deeply involved with the National Book Festival and all kinds of matters related to books and reading. This series really highlights new books by the Library of Congress and we always are fortunate enough to do it in partnership with some of our subject divisions and often if it's a new book, in partnership with the publishing office, which indeed is the case today. The goal really in some ways is to hold up a book and let you meet the author who will talk about the book and to help make the point that the resources and the research going on at the Library of Congress and in many other institutions often results in a book and books have their own importance as we all know and it's our honor to be able to present the author and the book. All of the talks in the Books and Beyond series are really going to be video taped for later showing on the webcast and so I'd like to ask you to turn off all things electronic and also the format will be our -- we'll introduce our speaker, John. We're very -- really lucky to have him here to introduce the book. He will speak for about 40 or 45 minutes. There will be a chance for questions and answers and if you're asking a question it could make you a part of our webcast. Thank you very much in advance. We will be done and start the book signing at about 1:00. And books are for sale out back in the foyer at the special Library of Congress discount so I hope that you will take advantage of that. In addition to thanking the Geography and Map Division and the Publishing Office for the cosponsorship, I would like to thank you for being here and for your support of all of the book related activities at the Library of Congress. I'll just say a quick word about the Book Festival. This year it's September 21st and 22nd on the National Mall. We have been very lucky once again in having a distinguished list of writers who are coming. We have been supported by David Rubenstein whose -- the private donation has enabled us to expand to two full days. Mr. Rubenstein also has recently given money to the Library of Congress for an exciting new Library of Congress Literacy Awards project which also has come to the Center for the Book so we're busy gathering information and nominations online for programs that promote -- well really combat illiteracy and also combat aliteracy which is a concept that has kind of grown up since Daniel Boorstin created the Center for the Book. An aliterate is a person who does read, who can read but doesn't read. And so part of the award ceremony and the award -- one of the three awards is really for combating aliteracy and it's bringing in many, many projects and I hope that we've expanded the deadline to the third -- 30th of April and if you know of groups that might be interested just let me know and I will try to make certain they're part of a nomination application process. That commercial being done, it's a pleasure to introduce Ralph Eubanks from the Publishing Office. One of our partners in this particular program and Ralph will introduce our speaker. Let's give Ralph a hand. [ Applause ] >> Ralph Eubanks: Thank you John. It is my great pleasure to introduce John Hessler who's the curator of the Jay Kislak Collection of the Library of Congress and is a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society. It's been my great pleasure over the last five years to work with John on three and almost four books. One of them being "The Naming of America" which is a commentary and a new translation of Martin Waldseemuller's "Cosmographiae Introductio" and just this last fall "Seeing the World Anew" the 1507 and 1516 world maps of Martin Waldseemuller and coming this fall will be a book that he's done with Daniel De Simone, Galileo, [speaking foreign language] Venice 1609. The book we are talking about today is, "The Renaissance Globemaker's Toolbox" which John Noble Wilford in New York Times said, "The reason this is an important book is because it helps us understand in a unique way how our modern scientific world view came into being." So lest you think that John spends all of his time working tirelessly on books for the Publishing Office I will also let you know that he is a mountaineer, very avid mountaineer and is a frequent contributor to the Alpinist. So I'd just like to turn it over to John Hessler. [ Applause ] >> John Hessler: Thank you Ralph. Thank you all for coming. It's a pleasure to speak with you about this book. Those of you who know my work and have had sort of followed the Waldseemuller books and the sort of history of Waldseemuller here at the library know that I'm extremely critical of the way the history of cartography tends to be written and this book is really no different. Today what I'd like you to think about as I'm kind of going through sort of the history of Schoner and his involvement with the Waldseemuller maps, I'm going to assume a certain familiarity with most of the audience on those maps. I'm not going to talk a lot about those. They've kind of been wrung through the ringer pretty well. So I'm going to really concentrate on Schoner but there's a couple things I want you to kind of keep in mind. Sort of things that the general history of cartography sort of forgets about. And one of the big controversies and one of the reasons that I really wanted to write the Schoner book was there's a couple of serious problems, scholarly problems which come up when we begin talking about early modern cartography, especially cartography that's really just coming out of the late Middle Ages and there's really three particular things that I -- like I said I want you to keep in mind. The first is a controversy that's been debated for many, many years among people who are more into the philosophy of science than into the history of science, but this is the continuity/discontinuity debate. And really what this is about is how is information transmitted? This is really one of the central, central problems in the history of cartography that is somewhat ignored by the historians who simply go and look at map after map after map and try and follow a train of information. But really, how is information not only transmitted from place to place but also how is it involved in the production of knowledge? How do these things, these maps that are produced actually produce new knowledge and how do they circulate? And that's really a two part problem. And the third one is really an epistemological problem. And it really has to do with the mixed sciences. Now cartography is not a pure science in any way and especially when you're looking at Aristotelian categories and categories of knowledge that are coming out of the Middle Ages there's really profound splits between things like pure mathematics and things like astronomy which tend to be one group and then things like physics which deal with material objects. But cartography is a mixed science. It kind of comes together and deals with both mathematical and astronomical phenomenon and it also has its material basis in the fact that you're actually mapping something on the earth and the epistemological questions of how this sort of knowledge comes together. How does a cartographer someone like Martin Waldseemuller someone like Johannes Schoner who's never left a little village like [assumed spelling] Sauntia or city like Nurnberg decide what pieces of information are useful? Which pieces of information are going to become parts of a map that he thinks somewhat reflects the factual display of the world? Now Johannes Schoner, this is a picture of him. He's not exactly the best looking man and this is probably the best picture of him. [laughter] There are several others and I'll show a couple later which the beard is even more scraggly. But Schoner was kind of an amazing character. He was born just before the discoveries of the New World and he died in 1547 just after Copernicus published the "De Revolutionibus" which as you all know is the thing that first gave us the heliocentric theory. So he lived during these extremely revolutionary times in both exploration and science. Now he also participated in those things in a number of different ways. Schoner early in his career created a number of globes which basically were based on some of Waldseemuller's work and some other mapmakers which are really radical visions of the geography of the world. Even more radical than Waldseemuller's vision and I'll talk about that in a little while. And then near the end of his life through one of his students he was really instrumental in convincing Copernicus to actually publish the "De Revolutionibus". And so he has this great span of time where he's participating in the most important revolutions which tend to give us our modern notions in science and our modern notions of geography. Besides that as a lucky happenstance there's a huge archive of materials by Schoner that happened to survive. So he's a unique character in that sense. So we're going to kind of go through an overview of his life. I'm going to show you some of his work, some of the things that he collected. John Wilford Noble in the New York Times Review referred to him as a pack rat. I've never used those words but I wish I did because it certainly pack rat really describes Schoner. He is not a person who has actually produced any real theories on his own. All of his globes are very, very early in his career. So really, he's a person who's a disseminator and by the end of this I think some of the conservators in the audience ought to consider him as the sort of proto-conservator, the first conservator or maybe the patron saint of conservators. But -- now the reason we're interested in Schoner here in the library is because of this book. And I want you to keep the image of this book in your mind and just its physical, the way it looks physically because we're going to talk about a lot of books that look exactly the same. This particular book is the Schoner [assumed spelling] Samelbond. This is the book which has now been named the Schoner Samelbond and that has sort of made its way into the scholarly literature, but the Schoner Samelbond is actually the book that contained the original 1507 and 1516 world maps. Better now here at the library. The 1507 map was of course purchased by the library in 2003 after a very long negotiation. There were lots of people responsible for that. Ralph Ehrenberg, the chief of the Geography and Map Division. Margaret [assumed spelling] Crewson who was very instrumental in getting it here, along with a number of other people and donors. The book itself after the 1507 map was removed was then taken back to the Castle at Wolfegg where it resided for a brief period. It was then purchased by Jake [assumed spelling] Hislack and donated to the library with the [assumed spelling] Carta Marina and all of the other paraphernalia that is in it which you will soon see. Now this is what the 1507 map looked like when it was in the book. Schoner's gatherings are as you'll soon see are real miscellaneous. There doesn't seem to necessarily be a real theme that I have been able to determine in the things that he puts together into these books. It appears as if he uses them for various purposes and as we go along we're going to spend a lot of time on late medieval and early modern astrology because it's my contention that Schoner really had all of these materials for astrological purposes as opposed to anything else. That he really was centrally an astrologer as opposed to either an astronomer or a mapmaker or a geographer. So this is what the book looks like when it was opened. Now the book itself is a peculiar story. Now when Schoner died in 1547 his library which contained this book and a whole bunch of other books -- lots of manuscripts that he collected through his life, books that he borrowed from other libraries. It was purchased by the merchant [assumed spelling] Gayarg Fugar and Fugar is a very important merchant in the northern Germany and the area of Vienna and he purchased Schoner's library and we can trace the history of Schoner's library down through a number of generations all the way down to Schoner's great grandson. And Schoner's -- or rather Fugar's great grandson and his great grandson then sells the library, Fugar's entire library which contains Schoner's books to Ferdinand, the third of Austria and those books are then deposited in the ONB or the Austrian National Library where they still reside. The question however is how one volume, the volume that we are talking about, the thing that I've termed the Globemaker's Toolbox here made it to this castle in Wolfegg, how it became separated from the rest of those materials. No one is really sure how that happened. I'll speculate on it a little bit later in the talk. But it's sort of a fascinating story. The map was actually discovered here and in fact was discovered in this room. This is the tour library at Wolfegg. This is where the rare materials that Wolfegg were originally kept. It was discovered here by father Joseph Fisher who was a Jesuit priest who was very busy studying Norse voyages at the time. Came to this library, he spent his summers when he was away. He taught at a boarding school in northern Austria. He would spend his summers going around to small castle libraries kind of studying their collections and looking for things that had to do with Norse voyages. But in this room he discovered the Waldseemuller maps in the binding that Schoner placed them in and he basically immediately knew what he was looking at. This is a map that had been speculated about and these maps had been talked about for many, many, years to the point where historians in the 19th century wrote actual books about what it might have looked like. There are actual facsimiles and drawings and things like that which actually show the map without ever having seen the map. They knew the map because there was a small book that Waldseemuller published along with it called the "Cosmographiae Introductio" and that book contains a description of the map and mentions the map on the cover. But this is the room at Wolfegg. Obviously you can see it's no longer the rare book library there. It is now the children's library at Wolfegg and when I visited there were lots of little children who wanted to show me all their books that I shouldn't really be looking at the old ones. They wanted to show me the new ones. Be it's an amazing room and it is in the south tower, the southeast tower of the library or the castle itself. Now Schoner was an amazing character in the fact that he owned a fairly large library for this period. I've estimated it -- that it probably was around 1200 volumes which is huge for this period of time. Not all of them were purchased. As we get a little bit further into this, you'll see some of them were borrowed and simply never returned. Some of them were seemingly stolen but he really did get stuff any way he possibly could. But one thing he did with all of his books is he heavily annotated them and this is a sample of some of his annotations and this is typically what you face when you open a Schoner book and this is from his 1482 "Olm Ptolemy". The "Olm Ptolemy" is an edition of Ptolemy's "Geographia" from 1482. It's one of the most important additions that were done and Schoner notated extremely heavily and one of the things he was very interested in was projections. For those of you who aren't map enthusiasts and don't know, if we think of the earth as an orange and you try and peel the skin off of an orange and flatten it out, you're going to have to tear it or twist it or do something to it in order to get it flat. You can't make it perfectly flat without doing something to it. And if you think of a map the same way, the map is the surface of the earth that we're peeling off and trying to flatten and we have to do something to it. We have to distort it, we have to tear it, we have to do something to it in order to flatten it out and a map projection is simply a mathematical way in order to keep track of those distortions. So in fact you can make an accurate map on a flat surface and Schoner was really, really interested in projections and one of the things that's unique about Schoner in really the history of cartography and as far as I can tell in the history of science, was he was obsessed with what is called the inverse projection problem. He was obsess with the problem of taking a flat map and converting it back into a globe. Especially early in his career and there are very, very few people who were creating globes out of flat maps in the way he was doing it and we'll see some of his annotations on the Waldseemuller maps reflect his attempt to solve an inverse projection problem. The thing we're looking at here is you'll see there's a sort of trapezoid figure in the middle there. Schoner was trying to determine what is an extremely complicated problem also which is determining what Ptolemy did to these sort of maps. These are Ptolemy trapezoidal projections. These are his regional and high scale maps that are found within the "Geographia". You'll see that they're not square. They are also trapezoids. That they are longer at the bottom than at the top and there's a certain distortion that happens between the top and the bottom and Schoner was really concerned about what the distortions are here. Now one of the reasons that Schoner is obsessed with accurate mapping and I'll mention this when I get into the astrology a little bit is he's really obsessed with finding accurate locations of places. And those places he needs because he's practicing a particular type of astrology called natal astrology and he needs a time of birth and he needs an exact location of the person's birth. And we'll get into that a little bit later but when you're thinking of Schoner's use of his maps you should think about the fact that more than a lot of the mapmakers of this period who are basically looking at large scale cosmographies and looking at the world and even Waldseemuller who's sort of presenting an overall universal vision of what the world looks like Schoner is really, really obsessed with looking at accuracy and looking at what actual places are on the surface of the earth and where they are. Now his projection studies extend very, very deeply and this is in the back of his 1482 Ptolemy. This particular book is actually at the National Library in Vienna and he makes extensive, extensive notes on Ptolemy's second projection and later in the volume he makes extensive notes on Ptolemy's second projection which is the one that Waldseemuller used. Now Ptolemy's second projection that Waldseemuller used is a little bit strange. Waldseemuller modifies it a little bit. And it appears as if that Schoner's notes reflect those modifications and that Schoner in fact had in front of him while he was doing this Waldseemuller's map. It may be the only connection that we know of between a scholar and the 1507 map itself except for a few mentions of it that happened much later. But it's at a really important mathematical point that occurs deeply inside Schoner's notes. These sort of things I spent years and years and years unfortunately of my life and eyesight reading these things most of which were not all that interesting but there were these extreme gems that would pop out. Now besides cartography Schoner was very, very interested in astronomy and this is an extremely important text and we're going to spend a little bit of time on this later on. This is all sort of intro material to kind of rev you up to the actual Schoner's use of these materials but this is a manuscript that is a bit of a Palimpsest in fact. What we're looking at here is we're looking at a manuscript of [assumed spelling] Geyorg Purbox New Theory of the Planets. It was probably the most important astronomical textbook up until Copernicus' time and almost everyone learned their astronomy from it, from about 1400 up until Schoner's time and a little bit later. But this particular thing is interesting because it's in the hand -- it's a copy of the book in the hand of a very famous astronomer who's name is Regiomontanus and we'll talk a little bit about Regiomontanus a little bit later because Schoner's fate and Regiomontanus' fate and somewhat of the fate of the Waldseemuller maps resides in the combination of those three people. But this is in Regiomontanus' hand and is also covered with Schoner's annotations. It's an extremely important book. It's also in the library in Vienna. One of the things that's important about it happens in the beginning of the book however, not on these pages. In the beginning of this book, there's bound into it an ephemeris. An ephemeris is basically a list of planetary positions for a particular time and a particular place and it's -- it has lists of stars where they would be found, lists of planets, eclipses that sort of thing calculated for a place. The one that Schoner has bound into the front of this is from Vienna and what's interesting about it is ephemeris in Greek is diary. And Schoner has then annotated all around the outsides with a diary. He has basically written some of his early life into this diary and that is the only place that we really get a sense of his personal life and basically what he writes is he talks about a relationship he has with a woman. He talks about the three children she bore him. He talks a lot about the various places that he was -- he was a parish priest at this period so he had three children out-of-wedlock with a woman. And at the end of it he is back in Bamberg which is where he was ordained in the Bishopric of Bamberg and basically at that point he's considering the conversion to Lutheranism. So Schoner will convert and he will become the first professor in Nurnberg of mathematics in 1526. So there's a long sort of trajectory to getting to Schoner the astronomer and Schoner the astrologer. There's a lot of parish priest work. There's a lot of taking care of children but it's interesting that this is the only place -- and he's done it in the border of this particular book. Now, when I asked you to remember what the Samelbond looked like it's because we're going to be looking at a lot of books like this that look exactly like the Samelbond. Schoner didn't just create one gathering. He created many, many, many, many gatherings of materials so the Samelbond that you're used to seeing and that the library has in its collection is just one of many. This is another one. This is Clinton manuscript 188. It is the only other book by Schoner that is not in the Vienna Library. The only major work of Schoner. There's a few pages here and there that have become scattered but this is Clinton manuscript 188. It's a gathering that rivals, I at least think of importance. Most people don't and cartographic historians certainly don't but I think this manuscript rivals in importance the gathering that we have here the Samelbond. And really, this particular thing, the gathering that we have there and we'll get into the contents in a minute is really -- it's a whole group of Regiomontanus manuscripts and a few manuscripts from a few other people. And just for those who don't know Regiomontanus was an extremely important young mathematician and astronomer. He died in 1476 so he died well before Schoner is looking and doing any scholarly work whatsoever but Schoner is going to become intimately involved with Regiomontanus' stuff simply because when he comes to Nurnberg in 1526 and becomes professor of mathematics just a few years before that the Nurnberg City Council had purchased Regiomontanus' entire library. And Schoner's going to find in that library many of the most important manuscripts that we have that basically talk about the movement of Arabic and Greek mathematics and astronomy to the north that aren't coming through Rome and aren't coming through Florence, aren't coming through the Italian renaissance but they're coming through the German renaissance directly through Vienna. And some of these manuscripts -- and we'll talk about a couple of them in just a minute -- are extremely critical to the history of science much like the way the Waldseemuller maps are critical to the history of cartography. Now Regiomontanus died when he was 40 years old and he's certainly the most brilliant late medieval mathematician that we know of and he published this particular little list here and this list is a list of the books that Regiomontanus wanted to publish in his lifetime so he made this list up while he was a student in Vienna and he published it. He actually said this is the list of books that I am going to publish and it's about 70 or 80 different volumes on here and he constitutes the most important works in the history of astronomy, mathematics, astrology, and geography up until this period. Regiomontanus will die before he gets to publish any of them but Schoner will take some of the manuscripts in fact that Regiomontanus wants to publish and Schoner will publish them and that's another part of Schoner's activity. He will edit and publish many, many very important books in mathematics, some which were critical to astronomers like Copernicus later on and we'll get to that in just a second. Now the Clinton -- this is Nurnberg by the way. This is where Regiomontanus lived and this is also where Schoner is going to become or becomes in 1526 the professor of mathematics, the first professor of mathematics. This is from the Nurnberg Chronicles so. Now the manuscript itself, this is what the Clinton 188 looks like and there are a number of titles in here. The one I'm showing is one of the things that I spent a lot of time on and it's a really, really critical manuscript. It's by a man who's name is [assumed spelling] Yohann de Mures and Yohann de Mures was a mathematician, an extremely important mathematician who wrote a book called the [assumed spelling] Quadropartum Numorum and the Quadropartum Numorum is one of the first instances we have of algebra being transferred from the Greeks to the north. Regiomontanus whose hand this is in had found several really important manuscripts in Vienna. One by a person who's name is Diophantus who's an extremely important Greek mathematician and several others. And this particular manuscript is really important because Schoner will actually take this manuscript and he will publish it at some point. And this is really what the manuscript looks like. And what we have is a series of problems. And basically these are -- it's not a text that teaches you how to do algebra, it's a text that automatically assumes that you know algebra. It's a text that assumes that you have a familiarity with it which is kind of a strange thing at this period simply because there are so few people who would know anything about this. The Diofantine manuscripts that were circulating at the time people couldn't make heads or tails of for the most part but basically a manuscript has the hand of Regiomontanus who copied it. It has annotations by both Schoner, Regiomontanus and several other really important people and I've been able to trace six or seven hands in this particular manuscript. And that's basically what it looks like. Now Schoner is going to publish it as something called the [assumed spelling] Algorithmis. And the Algorithmis is really interesting because the difference between the manuscript version and the actual printed version is really critical to getting an idea of who Schoner was and how he understood this material. One of the things that's fascinated is in the manuscript itself Regiomontanus uses actual symbolic algebraic notation. In other words notations like you would think of your algebra high school class with X squareds and that sort of stuff. It's one of the first instances where we see symbolic algebra being used that's coming through the Greeks. The Greeks did a little bit of it but Regiomontanus uses it quite extensively in the manuscript. Schoner eliminates it. And it's interesting because he eliminates it in places where it appears as if he might not have understood exactly what he was reading. So again it's one of those things where we see Schoner as this collector and publisher but not necessarily as the most brilliant scientist or most brilliant mathematician working out there and I think this is a theme that comes back again and again when we're talking about Schoner's life. Know the other thing I talked about in the beginning was Schoner's astrological work and like I said, I think this is perhaps the most important aspect of Schoner's work. Schoner wrote several books on astrology. Introductions to astrology and some very, very technical manuals on how a particular form of astrology was done which is called natal astrology. And this is an image from one of the books, a schematic of one of the images from Schoner's book and this is a typical medieval and early renaissance astrological chart. I'll show you one of the ones that Schoner actually drew up in just a minute in manuscript form but basically, natal astrology is a particular form of astrology that was very, very popular during this period, which doesn't predict events necessarily. Most of the practitioners are not interested in predicting events like an earthquake is going to happen or there's going to be a flood or something like that. Most of the people who practice this are interested in determining the future personalities and the future life prospects of their children and this is also by the way the type of astrology that in fact Galileo will practice. Galileo and his exigent notes have actual natal charts drawn up for his children and extensive communitaires on their personalities and through his life he updates those things and talks about how they're changing and how it's because this particular thing in Jupiter is changing. One of the asides that happen in Galileo's time where natal astrologers have developed this great, great system of where our planets and where things moved with the discovery by Galileo of Jupiter's moons that kind of threw everything into an oh my God there's more things to keep track of sort of idea. But Schoner practiced natal astrology. He was an expert at natal astrology. If you try and read this, it is just mind bending in its complications. One of the things that you see and when I -- in the beginning talked about this separation mixed sciences and pure sciences -- one of the things you'll see is a vast separation here even though they're riding on each other, between astronomy and astrology. Astrology is of course you know the same people who are doing astronomy are doing astrology. Astrology is not considered causally or epistemologically any different than astronomy but one of the things you will see is there is very little astrology placed into astronomical text whereas there's lots of astronomy placed into astrological texts. And there's a couple reasons for that and Schoner really goes into real detail attempting to defend natal astrology against people who are writing against it at this period. There's a real conflict of theologies and sort of causal theories of astronomy and astrology coming to a head at this point not only because of Copernicus but there's also the reformation and the attempts to sort of solidify sort of theological works. One of the things that we see in Schoner is a real sort of trajectory towards a more deductive sense of what science is. I wouldn't call him a scientist in any real sense but there's an underlying logic and there's an underlying train of thought which he's deriving from people like Rotesta and some of these early logicians. There's a very important person to Schoner who's name is[assumed spelling] El Gustino Efo who's a logician writing at this period and Schoner's going to take his ideas of what causality in science is and that doesn't preclude astrological and natal prediction. That's just included under the umbrella. We can't really separate the two at this time. Now this is a typical natal chart. This is one of Schoner's. This is actually was found in one of his copy of the introduction to astrology. It's a practice text. Don't know whether this is an early thing that he did just because he was practicing. It doesn't identify exactly who it is that he is doing a reading for. But basically what you see is you see the various houses of the zodiac on this thing. That's what all of those 12 triangles around there are and where the planets are and what their positions are and where they're moving and where they're going. And basically most of natal astrology derives like a lot of the stuff that we see in this period in geography from Ptolemy's text. Ptolemy wrote an important text called the "Tetrabiblos" and almost all of the astrology that Schoner is practicing is not an updated form. It's not a form that seems to rely very much on the medieval commentators on the "Tetrabiblos". It seems to be a very pure form that he's taking very much from Ptolemy's text. Now there's a preface that's written to Schoner's book and this really begins to kind of get to the point of Schoner as a person who's preserving texts. Even the people who are writing about Schoner and Philip Melanchthon is a really important person of the period. He founds a school. He does a lot of educational reforms in Germany of this period. He's also instrumental in getting mathematics added to the university curriculum so he is not exactly an irrational human being or anything that would give you a sense that he is dogmatic in any way as far as religion goes. He is of course Protestant. He is part of the reformation redoing of some of the educational systems in northern Germany and he's also a pro astrology. He writes about Schoner. He writes the preface to actual Schoner's book and basically talks about Schoner as being the person who preserved this science who basically done all the work to kind of bring this science and to keep it stable and otherwise it would be lost and we're going to see that again and again and again as we move through some of Schoner's other stuff. And really that's what sort of prefigures what's happening with the Samelbond and Schoner's compiling of all these texts in order to save them for later generations. In the actual preface to the text, there's actually a natal chart for Schoner himself so this is basically the prediction of Schoner's brilliance and his work in mathematics and his devotion to God and so it's a -- basically what a typical natal chart looks like of the period. Now Schoner annotates his maps and this is a contention which is sort of not accepted by everyone. I think Chet Van Duzer my coauthor on "The Naming of America" and I will argue over this constantly. Schoner's annotations on the maps that we know that he owned. The 1507 map and the 1516 Carta Marina are both annotated with red grids. Some of the most important places are tipped in red and coordinates are pulled off the maps. Now there are long, long lists of coordinates that are in Schoner's notes and there really two reasons that Schoner could have been taking the coordinates from places. One of course would be the fact that he is building globes early on in his career, 1515, 1520, he is doing a lot of work with globes. He did some of the most radical and most important early globes that we know of. The 1515 globe in particular also shows like Waldseemuller, a path around South America and the Pacific Ocean. Schoner also places the name America on the globe itself and I'll show you that in just a moment when we get to what's inside the Samelbonds itself. But he annotates the maps with these really, really precise grids. There are some areas of the map where the grids are a little bit more detailed than others and one can trace in his notes some of the regions that he was taking coordinates off of. I will tell you in his notes he favors the 1516 map heavily which is a much better map as far as its over all -- and I hate to use the word cartographic accuracy than the 1507 map but it is a little bit more accurate. But I believe Schoner was doing this a little bit later. The Samelbond as far as I can tell was probably bound together at about 1530, 1532 and I'll go into my reasons for that in a little while. So it was bound well after he finished with globe making. Schoner tended to finish with his globes early in his career and then sort of directed himself toward the more astrological and astronomical and mathematical pursuits later on especially in the 1530s and the early 1540s he is very much involved in the more astrological stuff than he is in the geographical material. Now, the other way that we know stuff about Schoner's life besides the diary in the ephemeris that I talked about earlier, is the fact that Schoner wrote prefaces to all of the books that he published and he wrote prefaces that are quite interesting. They show kind of his attitude towards the world, toward -- his attitude towards what he's doing. This particular book which is called on "Triangles of every Sort" is based on a Regiomontanus manuscript and it's -- the Regiomontanus manuscript that it's based on somehow and no one really knows how this occurred made its way to St. Petersburg, it's in the library in St. Petersburg. But in the preface to this, Schoner's going to make some really interesting comments about his time and what he's actually doing by publishing and preserving. I'm just going to read a short excerpt from the preface, a little bit longer than the one that's on the screen just so we get a sense of what these prefaces are like. And Schoner begins this one he says, "During these turbulent times when we were hemmed in by the stupidity of men, we see these arts nearly abandoned by all mortals. For this reason no one understands the praise I may evoke through the famous works I publish. For what is more worthy of the praise of letters than their protection? And in what battle do the arts seem more freely to spend their strength than in the praise of culture and its defense. When I took this task of publishing and editing the works of Regiomontanus upon myself I considered not so much what I wanted to do but simply what was possible in these times. I had some fear that my abilities in these scientific arts would not be up to the task. That it would cause -- give cause for complaints from my readers and from you. Now I know that complaints will only come from those who know little of the sciences. You know the times. No one really looks for a rebirth of the arts. They are so silent and neglected it may well be felled that the adults around us will stamp them out." [laughter] And so Schoner really is making sort of a commentary on the people around him on the arts and sciences and really on the fact that no one really understands why he's publishing and saving these materials. Now one of the things that gives us really explicit evidence that he kind of new what he was doing as the proto-conservator or proto-archivist that I'm kind of making him out to be is the bookplates that he put in many of these compilations. This is the bookplate that actually come from the Schoner Samelbond. It appears in Schoner's copy of the 1482 Ptolemy. It also appears in several of his hard oak bound notebooks and the translation of this as I think the most telling thing, it says that Schoner gives this to you posterity. As long as it exists there is a monument to his spirit. And so he really is giving it to posterity. He really is saying that this is for the future and that you know as long as it survives there's a monument to me who saved it. He is definitely not egoless. [laughter] So. So. And the other thing that Schoner's involved in and as he approached near the end of his life in the late 1530s and 1540s after he sort of went through the publishing of those materials, the book that I just talked about, the on Triangles of Every Sort was published in 1533, his publishing is going to slow down a little bit. He'll publish a couple astrological books and then at the end of his life in the 15 -- late 1530s 1538 he begins to take on students and we begin to know some of these student's names. And the most important student that he took on is a man called Joachim Rheticus and Rheticus was instrumental. He was a mathematician who was educated in Vienna and several other places and he came to Schoner in 1538-1539 to study with him. And as he was with Schoner for about a year or so, he decided to go off to Krakow. To go off to Krakow and to meet and learn what Copernicus was doing. And in the book I talk a little bit about this but the question of how is it that Schoner or anyone in Nurnberg kind of knew what Copernicus was up to. Copernicus kept things fairly quiet, didn't really want to publish the heliocentric system and had to be convinced to do so. But in around 1510-1512 Copernicus will produce a manuscript called the "Commentariolis". That's how it's come down to us known. There's only a few copies that exist. The "Commentariolis" is basically a primitive version of what Copernicus will publish in the "De Revolutionibus" and basically a primitive version of the theory that in fact that the earth moves and that it goes around the sun and that the sun is in fact stationary as opposed to the other way around. This does not seem to have circulated widely but it's my contention that a copy of it was known well by Schoner. There are several indications of this in some of his notes to the pure balk which he seems to have come back time and time again to. So when Rheticus arrived and Schoner was at this point interested in astronomy and astrology, it was only natural, I think, that he sent this brilliant student off to Copernicus to see what Copernicus was up to. After being with Copernicus for a short time Rheticus will write a letter back to Schoner. It was published before it was actually received by Schoner dedicated to Schoner called the "Narratio Prima". And the "Narratio Prima" is really the first published statement we have of the Copernican Theory. Rheticus -- two years before Copernicus publishes in 1440 -- in 1543 will really outline in detail Copernicus' heliocentric system and he will also provide much of the polemic that will be printed in later years defending it. Several of the early editions of the "De Revolutionibus" will actually print the "Narratio Prima" in it along with it but it's an extremely important task that Schoner had first kind of dibs on but there seems to have been a great deal of discussion in Nurnberg at this time about Copernicus' theories. One of the things that's interesting in the "De Revolutionibus" itself, actual Copernicus will actually give Schoner credit for several of the most important astronomical observations of the planet Mercury. Mercury being the very difficult mathematical exercise for Copernicus. So Schoner is seemingly intimately involved in some of these activities also. Now back to the Samelbond just so we can kind of wrap up on the things that we actually have here, the Samelbond itself, you've seen the binding. It of course contains the 1507 and 1516 world maps by Martin Waldseemuller which as I said in the beginning I'm not really going to talk much about. But it contains some other extremely important objects. Everything that is bound into the Samelbond is the only surviving copy. So one can make an argument that it is the single most important collection of renaissance cartographic and astronomical materials to have survived. The thing that we're looking at now is a set of globe gores. They're celestial gores. They are done by Johannes Schoner. This is an early version of Schoner's globe gores. Schoner produced in 1517 a globe, a celestial globe. This one differs from it in a number of very, very important ways. I'm not going to go into the details but it differs in a lot of important ways. It's also heavily annotated by Schoner. Schoner is looking at the comparisons between the positions of various star charts that he uses in order to actually incorporate these. One of the interesting things about Schoner's globes is we don't have very much record of how many he made and how widespread they were. There is an interesting painting in the national gallery of art in London called the "Ambassadors" by Holbein. You've probably all seen it. It's two ambassadors standing in their furry coats with astronomical instruments all around them. There's a celestial globe sitting on the one side. It is Schoner's celestial globe because there's some important differences that are on that globe so they at least had to travel a little bit. But this is the only surviving copy of this particular globe's gores. The other thing that was in there is in the binding when Joseph Fisher as I talked about earlier the discoverer of the volume took it apart in order to make a lithograph. There was a lithograph facsimile made of the 1507 and 1516 world maps in 1903 two years after its discovery. When he took it apart he found these in the binding. These are in fact also fragments of a globe. This again is a different Schoner celestial globe than the one that I showed you before so again this is another globe that we have no representative copies. All we have are these fragments. The other strange thing about this particular globe gore is that it's printed on vellum so it's printed on animal skin. It's the only known globe gore that's printed on animal skin. Why one would print a globe gore on animal skin I don't know but it was obviously some sort of belief -- at least I believe failed experiment. Maybe he thought it would be more durable. We don't have any leather globed -- leather gores that I know of so. The other thing that was found in the binding was fragments of terrestrial globe. This is again an example of Schoner's terrestrial globe and there's a couple of things that are very important to see here. On the left I've got the relevant Waldseemuller sheet. You'll see that Schoner has also written the name America. And this particular gore probably dates from 1515 so it's a very early representation. You'll also see that South America has a passage around it with a continent in fact shown below it. So South America is even much more radically portrayed at this time by Schoner than it is by Waldseemuller on the 1507 map. It's an extremely important gore. Again there are differences. Schoner did a 1515 globe. He also did a 1523 globe. There are important differences between this gore and both of those so again the only surviving known copy. Just so you can see one particular aspect that of course leads us to believe that a lot of this was taken from Waldseemuller's text is the fact that on the Waldseemuller map on the right hand side here Waldseemuller has included this characteristic break which is now been called the Waldseemuller gap. This is a gap that you can almost bet anyone who puts it on a map has derived it from seeing the 1507 map because there are almost no other maps that show it. Schoner is actually taking the gap and also putting it in place on his globe. This is just another view. The view on the right is from the 1515 globe that shows the passage just the way the fragments do. So the 1515 globe is actually -- still survives in Frankfurt and it will be the 500th anniversary of it coming up next year and there's -- or two years from now and there will be a big celebration in Frankfurt of the globe and in Nurnberg. Last thing that was bound into the Samelbond is the only part of the Samelbond that isn't still with it. It is this star chart. This is a star chart of the southern hemisphere by Albrecht Durer. Schoner has heavily annotated it. This is the first known printed star chart by the way. This is of the southern hemisphere and Schoner annotates it heavily. This particular star chart is known to be very inaccurate especially in the southern hemisphere. If one thinks about it, we are in -- in this case we are in 1515 to 1518 when this star chart is being composed and printed. The southern hemisphere of stars in the southern hemisphere they can't see -- be seen below the equator. There's not a lot of information on those. But it's considered quite inaccurate and Schoner has annotated it quite heavily. He's also annotated it with lots and lots of different stellar names. A lot of these are extremely important because he's basically transliterating some of the Arabic names for very important stars like Spica, stars that really figure critically into actually Copernicus' observations and Copernicus' examples that he uses in the "De Revolutionibus". This hasn't been studied very well, these annotations. They've been looked at by a number of scholars and the changes also that he makes to the chart. There is some sense that Schoner is working through some very complex astronomical problem. I haven't been able to kind of make heads or tails of it. A lot of the star names that Schoner has written here and that he's talking about are from the northern hemisphere and don't actually appear on the thing itself. The star chart is one of the key pieces to the Samelbond, it's history simply because it is thought by the Prince of Wolfegg that his family in fact and we talked early about how that particular volume might have gotten separated from the rest of the library. The prince of Wolfegg has the largest collection of Durer prints in private hands and believes that some time during the 30 years war that his family acquired the Samelbond just for the star chart itself. The fact that the star chart was there. They cannot -- obviously they have no evidence to that. There's no list of the library during that period but it's an interesting speculation. So that's really what I have for you. I've just kind of given an overview of kind of the areas the book covers. The whole point of the book at least from my perspective this is the third in the series of the Waldseemuller books and I will say the final [laughter] in a series. There are many, many scholars who will come after me that I hope will do a much, much better job. My coauthor for instance on "The Naming of America", Chet Van Duzer has the sort of obsession, youth and drive that will move this stuff forward. So thank you all for coming and listening. [applause] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.