MÜNSTER, SEBASTIAN. - Geographer, cosmographer and orientalist, b. at Nieder-Ingelheim in 1489, d. at Basel on 26 May 1552. In 1505 he took the Franciscan habit; he studied Greek and Hebrew in 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, whence in 1528 he moved to Basel for the same teaching and there remained for almost twenty-five years until his death. But previously, having met Luther at Worms, he had converted to Lutheranism. The fruit of his Hebrew studies is, first and foremost, the great edition of the Bible in Hebrew with a Latin version (1534-35).
His best-known works are the geographical ones: the editions of Mela, of Solinus, of Ptolemy's Geography (with many new maps) and then the Cosmographia Universalis, published first in German in 1544, but which had very numerous editions also in Latin and in all the principal European languages. The enormous diffusion of the work was due above all to the fact that it was the first great description of the whole known world and of its peoples composed after the closing of the heroic age of the great geographical discoveries; but, although M. worked on it for 18 years, it still contains legendary or fantastic elements and in general material not sufficiently sifted; it nevertheless has a very prominent place in the geographical literature of the sixteenth century. Of notable interest is also its cartographic apparatus. Of M. there are, separately or annexed to his works, more than 140 geographical maps, but only a part of them is the fruit of original elaboration.