Networked Nation explores the production and impact of Sebastian Münster's monolithic Cosmographia Universalis. Though nominally a cosmography, Jasper van Putten here argues that Münster's thirty-six-volume work related mainly the history and topography of an “imagined community” of the German nation. The Cosmographia went through thirty-one editions from 1544 to 1628, but van Putten here focuses on the production of the 1550 edition, which contained new illustrations from contributors throughout the Holy Roman Empire. Although this work has become inseparable from Sebastian Münster, according to van Putten, it was really Münster's wide Renaissance and Protestant network that made the book possible. In contrast to other recent works on Münster's Cosmographia, van Putten's study goes beyond simply mentioning the importance of networks for Renaissance publications; it elucidates exactly how they were important. Essentially, Münster solicited city councils and rulers for contributions in the form of texts, images, maps, and money.

Getting contributors also to pay for the publication of the book was a novel form of financing. Münster could punish cities or rulers for neglecting to contribute by omitting them from his Cosmographia altogether or by giving their territory a generic pictorial or textual description. Alternatively, a generous patron/contributor would be rewarded with a particularly favorable description of their home or a description that validated their claim to power. As contributors promoted their own agendas and worldviews, they simultaneously expressed a German national identity that shared symbols, styles, and origin myths with other contributors. Thus, this is a story of German national-identity formation through the promotion of that German strand of particular local, civic, and personal values.

Van Putten explains the subjects of his seven chapters as corresponding to each of the professions involved in the Cosmographia’s production (cosmographer, artist, middleman, patron, draftsman, woodcutter, and printer). But all of the chapters revolve around the central tenant that Münster's project of promoting German national identity appealed to many types of rulers (civic, secular, and sacred) in the Holy Roman Empire as well as to Renaissance artists, printers, and political liaisons. Through extensive research into the contributors to the Cosmographia, van Putten provides case studies that show how rulers used city portraits for self-aggrandizement (chapter 2), how city councils depicted their realms differently than territorial rulers (chapter 4), and what role a map or image could play in determining dynastic struggles (chapter 5).

Another distinguishing factor in this study of the Cosmographia is that instead of looking back to the lineage of mapmaking and cosmographia from antiquity, van Putten looks forward to argue that this work was the germ of a new genre: the city book. What this genre shift signifies, according to van Putten, is the shift in dominance from the Habsburg ancestral state to the large territorial states in central Europe in the early seventeenth century, when Münster's work fell out of print. The Cosmographia not only marked this transition but also encouraged it.

Van Putten's background as a printmaker and art historian gives this book a very visual bent a la Bruno Latour. Through this lens, the Cosmographia promoted a graphic process of ordering the world. Brill did the academy a service in printing 120 high-quality color images in this volume, which are essential for illustrating this part of van Putten's thesis. Van Putten's knowledge is broad and deep, which leads to an engaging and learned book. However, van Putten's wide interests give way to mammoth digressions. In one instance, this reader found herself pages deep into a story about Charlemagne's founding of the Grossmünster in Zurich and had to stop to ask, “Why am I here?” The book would have benefited from more signposting throughout. This is a minor criticism in a book that is otherwise remarkable for its ability to connect many seemingly disparate aspects of Renaissance book culture.