MÜNSTER, SEBASTIAN. — Geographer, cosmographer, and Orientalist, born at Nieder-Ingelheim in 1489, died at Basel on 26 May 1552. In 1505 he donned the Franciscan habit; he studied Greek and Hebrew at the Franciscan convent of Ruffach under the guidance of C. Pellikan, then mathematics, cosmography, and astronomy under J. Stöffler at Tübingen. In 1524 he was appointed teacher of Hebrew at the University of Heidelberg, from where in 1528 he moved to Basel to teach the same subject, and there remained for almost a quarter of a century until his death. Earlier, however, having met Luther at Worms, he had converted to Lutheranism. The foremost fruit of his Hebrew studies is the great edition of the Hebrew Bible with a Latin version (1534–35).
His best-known works are geographical: the editions of Mela and Solinus, the Geography of Ptolemy (with many new maps), and subsequently the Cosmographia Universalis, first published in German in 1544, but which also went through very numerous editions in Latin and in all the principal European languages. The work’s enormous diffusion was due above all to the fact that it was the first great description of the entire known world and its peoples composed after the close of the heroic age of the great geographical discoveries; yet, although M. worked on it for 18 years, it still contains legendary or fantastic elements and, generally, materials insufficiently scrutinized; it nevertheless occupies a highly prominent place in sixteenth-century geographical literature. Its cartographic apparatus is also of considerable interest. More than 140 geographical maps by M. are known, either separately or appended to his works, but only some of them are the product of original elaboration.