Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet

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An enthralling biography of the man who created the first real map of the world and changed civilization

Born at the dawn of the age of discovery, Gerhard Mercator lived in an era of formidable intellectual and scientific advances. At the center of these developments were the cartographers who painstakingly pieced together the evidence to create ever more accurate pictures of the planet. Mercator was the greatest of all of them-a poor farm boy who attended one of Europe's top ...

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2-Jan-03 Hardcover New Brand New 368 pages. 1.23 x 9.72 x 6.40. Never read or open. May have a remainder mark.

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More About This Book

Overview

An enthralling biography of the man who created the first real map of the world and changed civilization

Born at the dawn of the age of discovery, Gerhard Mercator lived in an era of formidable intellectual and scientific advances. At the center of these developments were the cartographers who painstakingly pieced together the evidence to create ever more accurate pictures of the planet. Mercator was the greatest of all of them-a poor farm boy who attended one of Europe's top universities, was persecuted and imprisoned by the Inquisition, but survived to coin the term "atlas" and to produce the so-called projection for which he is known. Devoutly religious, yet gripped by Aristotelian science, Mercator struggled to reconcile the two, a conflict mirrored by the growing clash in Europe between humanism and the Church.

Mercator solved the dimensional riddle that had vexed cosmographers for so long: How could the three-dimensional globe be converted into a two-dimensional map while retaining true compass bearings? The projection revolutionized navigation and has become the most common worldview.

Nicholas Crane-a fellow geographer-has combined a keen eye for historical detail with a gift for vivid storytelling to produce a masterful biography of the man who mapped the planet.

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Editorial Reviews

The New York Times
Nicholas Crane has written not only a thorough, deeply researched biography but an intricate history of the European lowlands. Many forces shaped Mercator's life: plague and war, humanism and the Reformation, Lutheranism and Calvinism. Crane, the author of Two Degrees West and Clear Water Rising, portrays a man at once visionary and a product of his age. — Tyler D. Johnson
Publishers Weekly
In the course of a life that nearly spanned the 16th century, that glorious age of exploration, a Flemish peasant's son, Gerard Mercator, helped shape the modern perception of the planet while seldom venturing beyond the confines of a corner of northwestern Europe. Crane (Clear Waters Rising), a British geographer and adventurer, makes much of Mercator's long life and uses this longevity as an organizing theme of the biography: "surviving for twice as long as many of his contemporaries, he was able to mature through two consecutive life spans." In the first half of his life, the comparatively impetuous Mercator, struggling with his ideals, was imprisoned under the inquisition. In the second, with his passions more focused, he conceived and drew the first modern map using a "projection" that solved certain navigational problems; eventually, he created the first unified compilation of maps of the world, called an atlas. The raw material here is rich: there's the story of a poor boy makes good, explorations into civil and martial turmoil, and the excitement of new discoveries. While Crane sometimes loses track of the main story amid the minutiae of shipping manifests, he does demonstrate a real talent for incorporating letters and documents from diverse sources into very readable prose, as well as teasing Mercator's personality out of sometimes scant or tangential sources. (Jan.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
British geographer and author Crane makes his US debut with a weighty biography of the 16th-century cobbler’s son who determined how we view the world. Born Gerard Kremer of Germanic parents in a Belgian village in 1512, Mercator would have called the trade he virtually invented "cosmography" as opposed to cartography. An uncle sponsored Kremer, by his teens an orphaned pauper, to a formal education. It was the heady time when the humanist movement’s classical revivalism arose in the shadow of larger-than-life figures like Luther and Erasmus to challenge the Catholic Church with Aristotelian science (among other things). Kremer had to struggle to teach himself the necessary mathematics after he decided there was more money in applied science than in philosophy, and his skill in engraving copper plates with cursive script brought him into collaboration with mapmakers. After a seven-month incarceration on suspicion of heresy (or at least associating with known heretics), the man who had latinized his name in the humanist fashion to represent himself as a merchant of books started in earnest on work that would literally change the perception of ordinary citizens, who had been bound since the Middle Ages to a largely imaginary world. Using triangulation to calculate distances brought accuracy and thus reality to maps for the first time. But it would be years before Mercator, who never went to sea and rarely ventured farther from home than the Frankfurt Book Fair, established a method for accurately projecting the surface of a solid globe onto a flat piece paper, a method NASA still uses today to plot details of planets its roving satellites survey. Above all, Crane notes, Mercator’s methodcreated maps that were "practical, accessible and could be precisely overlapped." Lucid insights into the arcane processes of cartography, together with a meticulous map of the tenor of the times show humanist genius surviving and thriving amid the death throes of feudalism.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780805066241
  • Publisher: Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
  • Publication date: 1/3/2003
  • Edition description: 1ST AMER.
  • Pages: 320
  • Product dimensions: 6.56 (w) x 9.58 (h) x 1.29 (d)

Meet the Author

Nicholas Crane, a geographer and adventurer, is the author of two acclaimed books, Two Degrees West and Clear Waters Rising. He lives in London.

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