The World of Gerard Mercator: The Mapmaker Who Revolutionized Geography

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About The World Of Gerard Mercator: The Mapmaker Who

From Publishers Weekly Maps today strike us as fairly innocuous charts of the world. But 500 years ago, an era when political power and religious authority were in flux, maps were fraught with implications that made owning the "wrong" map a cause for execution. Into this world came Flemish mapmaker Gerard Mercator (1512–1594), whose new technique forged modern cartography as we know it. Mercator devised an ingenious compromise between accurately depicting the varying lengths of latitudinal circles between the poles and the equator and accurately depicting geographic details that is the basis for nearly all maps in use today. British historian Taylor (God's Fugitive) neatly surveys Mercator's invention along with the rest of his professional career, while delving into hardships caused by the Inquisition, which arrested him on suspicions of Lutheran heresy, and the bubonic plague, which touched his family. The background material on 16th-century exploration and European politics is effectively presented, helping readers to understand how Mercator was able to successfully navigate a web of political intrigues. Taylor also discusses modern attempts to "correct" various distortions in the comparative sizes of major land masses. This occasionally lively chronicle should appeal to a core audience of history and geography buffs. 40 b&w illus. and 7 maps. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Product Description A biography of the mapmaker who revolutionized geography The story of discovery and mapmaking is one of pushing back shadows," writes Andrew Taylor, and "none in the last two thousand years achieved as much as Gerard Mercator in extending the boundaries of what could be comprehended." His life encompassed most of the turbulent, extraordinary sixteenth century, a time when revolutions would engulf religion, science, and civilization. Almost extinguished by the Inquisition, Mercator's genius lay in making maps, and his achievement did nothing less than revolutionize the study of geography. Appropriately for an era undergoing radical change, Mercator was full of contradiction, tied to knowledge and beliefs of the past while forging a new path. He never traveled beyond northern Europe, yet he had the imagination to draw the entire world anew and to solve a problem that had baffled sailors and scientists for centuries: how a curved Earth could be faithfully rendered on a flat surface so as to allow for accurate navigation. His "projection" was so visionary that it is used by NASA to map Mars today. Andrew Taylor has beautifully captured Mercator amidst the turmoil and opportunity of his times and the luminaries who inspired his talent―his teacher and business partner, Gemma Frisius; the English magus, John Dee; his benefactor, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, his cartographic collaborator, Abraham Ortelius. The World of Gerard Mercator is a masterful biography of one of the men most responsible for the modern world. From Booklist Mercator's physical world in the 1500s was small: raised in modern-day Belgium, he lived and worked in Duisburg in modern Germany, and never put to sea. Historically, though, his times were large: voyages of discovery extended horizons and stoked imperial competitions while the Reformation upset faiths and lives--including Mercator's own. As readers might recall from a comparable recent biography (Nicholas Crane's Mercator, 2003), the Inquisition imprisoned Mercator but released him after a strenuous appeal by his "doughty" wife, as biographer Taylor describes Barbe. This incident is an example of Taylor's psychological approach to his subject. Inferring Mercator's traits from the handful of surviving comments about his personality, Taylor portrays a man of native caution and natural affability who was as esteemed in his time as he is famous in ours for the Mercator projection. Clarifying the technique's superiority to preceding methods of flatten