Annotation for Education in the Princeton/Brussels Copy of the 1525 Edition of Ptolemy’s Geography

FAIN: FA-252070-17

Chet Adam Van Duzer
Unaffiliated independent scholar

Participating institutions:
Early Manuscripts Electronic Library (Rolling Hills Estates, CA) - Participating Institution

Preparation of a digital edition of the annotations on a 1527 copy of Ptolemy's Geography that illuminate the understanding and teaching of geography in the early 16th century.

I seek a ten-month Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication to fund the completion of my transcription, English translation, and study of the annotations in a copy of the 1525 edition of Ptolemy’s Geography that is currently divided between Princeton and a private collection in Brussels. The annotations, written in Latin in about 1527, are extremely profuse, were made for a student, and contain original geographical thought. They are valuable for studies of the reception of Ptolemy’s Geography, of sixteenth-century geographical education, and of European intellectual networks. The only good format in which to publish them is in a digital edition that shows images of the pages and thus the context of each annotation, with a full transcription and English translation, all searchable. Princeton has agreed to host the digital edition on its server in an instantiation of the open-source Mellon-funded Archaeology of Reading platform for digital editions of annotated early modern books.

Associated Products

“Distant Sons of Adam: A Newly Discovered Early Voice on the Origin of the Peoples of the New World” (Article)
Title: “Distant Sons of Adam: A Newly Discovered Early Voice on the Origin of the Peoples of the New World”
Author: Chet Van Duzer
Abstract: One of the many intellectual problems that faced Europeans following the discovery of the New World was how those lands had been populated before their European discovery, if all humans had descended from Adam and Eve. One hypothesis to account for the presence of Amerindian peoples was based on a passage in the pseudo-Aristotelian De mirabilibus auscultationibus, which spoke of Carthaginian navigators discovering a large island in the Atlantic. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo in his Historia general de las Indias (1535) was believed to be the first to suggest that this passage showed that the New World had been discovered and populated in antiquity, and this theory was maintained by many later authors. In this article I examine anonymous annotations relating to the New World in a copy of the 1525 edition of Ptolemy’s Geography now split between Princeton and a private collection in Brussels. The annotator proposes this same theory about eight years before Oviedo, and I suggest that the theory was transmitted from the annotator to Oviedo by way of Willibald Pirckheimer’s Germaniae explicatio (1530, 1532). In fact, of the authors whose writings survive today, the annotator seems to have been the first not just to have proposed the Carthaginian origin for the native peoples of the New World, but the first to propose any theory to account for their presence.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://www.brepolsonline.net/doi/abs/10.1484/J.VIATOR.5.112363
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Viator 47.3, pp. 365-385
Publisher: Belgium: Brepols Publishers

Schemes of Annotation in Copies of Ptolemy’s Geography at the Lilly Library, Library of Congress, and Princeton (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Schemes of Annotation in Copies of Ptolemy’s Geography at the Lilly Library, Library of Congress, and Princeton
Author: Chet Van Duzer
Abstract: Claudius Ptolemy wrote his Geography in the second century A,D., and following its rediscovery in Constantinople in about 1300, it became one of the most popular geographical texts of the European Renaissance, copied in many manuscripts and printed in many editions. But Ptolemy offers very little in the way of description of different regions and peoples, so the work came to be supplemented in various ways. Non-Ptolemaic descriptive texts were added to printed editions of the book, and users of the book added descriptive material from various sources, providing excellent evidence regarding the reception of the work and early modern reading practices. In this talk I will examine the schemes of annotation in four different copies of the Geography: the 1511 Thacher copy at the Library of Congress; the copy of the 1513 edition at the Lilly Library; the 1486 Thacher copy at the Library of Congress; and the copy of the 1525 edition at Princeton. By comparing these different schemes of annotation I will bring out the extraordinary nature of the annotations in the Princeton 1525 Ptolemy, which is the object of my current NEH-Mellon fellowship research.
Date: 7/27/2017
Primary URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtmeBNWrLrU
Primary URL Description: A video of the talk.
Conference Name: Stand alone talk at the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress

The (Ptolemaic) World is Not Enough: Annotation for Education in the Princeton Copy of Ptolemy’s Geography, 1525 (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: The (Ptolemaic) World is Not Enough: Annotation for Education in the Princeton Copy of Ptolemy’s Geography, 1525
Author: Chet Van Duzer
Abstract: The talk offers a brief discussion of the elaborate program of manuscript annotation in Princeton's copy of the 1525 edition of Ptolemy's Geography. The annotations were composed c. 1527, and are addressed to a student, and thus the annotations represent a program of geographical education in the early sixteenth century. The annotations were written by a scribe and their layout in the book was organized with great care, indicating that this copy was made for a very wealthy client. The annotator adds few references to modern history, but instead devotes his efforts to supplementing Ptolemy with descriptive texts culled from classical geographers, and from compilations such as Caelius Rhodiginus's Lectionum antiquarium and Marco Antonio Sabellico's Rapsodiae Historiarum Enneadum. In the Princeton copy, the annotated maps were combined with the unnanotated text of another copy of the book; the text of the 1525 edition annotated by the same annotator, which originally formed part of the same book with the Princeton maps, has been identified in a private collection in Europe.
Date: 8/31/2017
Primary URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnnKhm0uXGI
Primary URL Description: A video of the talk.
Conference Name: A talk at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.

A Previously Unknown Sixteenth-Century Description of the Shrine of St. Thomas Becket (Article)
Title: A Previously Unknown Sixteenth-Century Description of the Shrine of St. Thomas Becket
Author: Chet Van Duzer
Abstract: This article discusses a previously unknown description of the shrine of Thomas Becket formerly in Canterbury Cathedral which appears in the handwritten annotations in a copy of the 1525 edition of Ptolemy’s Geography at Princeton University Library. The annotations were composed c. 1527; the annotator had visited England, but it is not clear whether he wrote the description based on his own visit to the shrine, or copied it from a source that no longer survives. One striking element of the annotator’s description is his assertion that there were three royal crowns at the top of the shrine. Differences between his description and other descriptions and representations of the shrine suggest that the shrine’s decoration evolved over time.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: https://www.brepolsonline.net/doi/abs/10.1484/J.VIATOR.5.115987?journalCode=viator
Access Model: Subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Viator
Publisher: Viator 48.2 (2017), pp. 323-334

“Reuniting the Two Halves of an Extraordinary Annotated Book: The Princeton 1525 Ptolemy” (Article)
Title: “Reuniting the Two Halves of an Extraordinary Annotated Book: The Princeton 1525 Ptolemy”
Author: Chet Van Duzer
Abstract: This article tells the story of a remarkable book, a very heavily annotated copy of the 1525 edition of Ptolemy’s Geography. I encountered the book in the Princeton University Library and began studying the annotations, but Princeton only had one half of the book, the maps. I then learned that the other half of the book, the text block annotated in the same hand, was in a private collection in Brussels. Now the two halves of the book are together again at Princeton. Following that history I describe some features of the book’s prolific program of annotation, which—unusually among early modern annotated books—was composed for a student, so that the annotations represent a program of geographical education in the early sixteenth century.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://library.princeton.edu/news/general/2022-11-02/inside-chronicle-reuniting-two-halves-extraordinary-annotated-book-princeton
Access Model: Subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Princeton University Library Chronicle 79.1 (2022), pp. 12-37
Publisher: Princeton University Press

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