MÜNSTER, SEBASTIAN. — Geographer, cosmographer, and Orientalist, b. at Nieder-Ingelheim in 1489, d. at Basle on 26 May 1552. In 1505 he entered the Franciscan Order; he studied Greek and Hebrew in the Franciscan convent at Ruffach under C. Pellikan, and later mathematics, cosmography, and astronomy with J. Stöffler at Tübingen. In 1524 he was appointed professor of Hebrew at the University of Heidelberg, and in 1528 he moved to Basle for the same chair, remaining there for nearly twenty-five years until his death. Previously, having met Luther at Worms, he had converted to Lutheranism. The fruit of his Hebrew studies is above all the great edition of the Hebrew Bible with a Latin translation (1534–35).
His best-known works are the geographical ones: editions of Mela, Solinus, and Ptolemy’s Geography (with many new maps), and then the *Cosmographia Universalis*, first published in German in 1544, but which had 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 entire known world and its peoples composed after the close of the heroic age of geographical discovery; yet, although MÜNSTER worked on it for about eighteen years, it still contains legendary or fantastic elements and, generally, material not sufficiently verified; it nevertheless occupies a very prominent place in sixteenth-century geographical literature. Also of considerable interest is his cartographical apparatus. Of MÜNSTER, there are, separate or appended to his works, more than 140 geographical maps, though only a part of these are the result of original elaboration.