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Lorenz Fries: [Africa] Tabula IIII. Aphricae. Hae Sunt E Cognitis Totius Orbis . . . (title on verso)
Title: [Africa] Tabula IIII. Aphricae. Hae Sunt E Cognitis Totius Orbis . . . (title on verso) Map Maker: Lorenz Fries
Description: One of the earliest obtainable modern maps of Africa, based upon the work of Waldseemuller. Prester John in depicted sitting on a throne in the area where his kingdom was believed to exist. Nice depiction of the supposed course of the Nile and other early conjectural and mythcial information about the interior of Africa. The publisher of this edition, Michael Villanovus (or Servetus), was tried by Calvin for heresy and burned at the stake with several of his books. Lorenz (Laurent) Fries was born in Alsace in about 1490. He studied medicine, apparently spending time at the universities of Pavia, Piacenza, Montpellier and Vienna. After completing his education, Fries worked as a physician in several places, before settling in Strassburg, in about 1519. While n Strassburg, Fries met the Strasbourg printer and publisher Johann Grüninger, an associate of the St. Die group of scholars formed by, among others, Walter Lud, Martin Ringmann and Martin Waldseemuller. From 1520 to 1525, Fries worked with Gruninger as a cartographic editor, exploiting the corpus of material that Waldseemuller had created. Fries' first venture into mapmaking was in 1520, when he executed a reduction of Martin Waldseemuller's wall-map of the World, published in 1507. While it would appear that Fries was the editor of the map, credit is actually given in the title to Peter Apian. The map, Tipus Orbis Universalis Iuxta Ptolomei Cosmographi Traditionem Et Americ Vespucii Aliorque Lustrationes A Petro Apiano Leysnico Elucubrat. An.o Dni MDXX, and was issued in Caius Julius Solinus' Enarrationes, edited by Camers, and published in Vienna in 1520. Fries next project that Fries was a new edition of the Geographia of Claudius Ptolemy, which was published by Johann Koberger in 1522. Fries evidently edited the maps, in most cases simply producing a reduction of the equivalent map from Waldseemuller's 1513 edition of the Geographie Opus Novissima, printed by Johann Schott. Fries also prepare three new maps for the Geographie: maps of South-East Asia and the East Indies, China and the World, but the geography of these derives from Waldseemuller's world map of 1507.
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