In early modern Europe, the North Sea was seen as lying on the edges of the inhabited world, and maps of its inhabitants commanded particular interest. Shortly after Sweden’s conversion, the archbishop of Uppsala, Olaf Månsson (or Olaus Magnus [1490–1557]), mapped the uncharted Scandinavia in a Carta Marina that long fascinated readers. The map of Northern Europe, first printed in Venice in 1539, linked land and sea in innovative ways, but attracted readers by combining accurate bearings of latitude and longitude with pictorial images of animals on land and sea. Nigg, an expert on monsters as much as a historian, is intrigued by the creatures that populate the map’s swirling western waters and focuses on them in a set of color plates that reproduce the bestiary in the map, which he examines as the central inheritance of this unique project of regional mapping — taking the map as a form of reportage as much as an assemblage.

Nigg organizes his study around the sea creatures that populated the northern waters and charted a region absent from ancient geography, expanding Ptolemy’s precepts by a learned bestiary combining a classical heritage with tales “told by fishermen and sailors” (12). Readers should look elsewhere for the former archbishop of Uppsala’s life. Nigg showcases this cartographical curiosity as an authoritative source of natural history, privileging its empirical basis over the map’s wonder as evidence of the fluid overlap between land and shore of Scandinavia. The authority of the map reflects the companion text Olaus expanded to twenty-one books by 1551, which must have directed early modern naturalists to the animals that populated its swirling seas; rather than examining this text, save in a 1658 English translation, Nigg traces how Olaus’s images migrated not only into maps, but a literature on monstrosities and marvels.

The Carta Marina was a source in the natural sciences over the century, mediating an unknown European north as the genre of regional maps grew in prints, and offering an expansive gloss on its contents. Many may wish Nigg consulted more than a color reproduction, reproduced in full-scale in the dust jacket’s verso, or examined the original commentary beyond visual detective work on its sea creatures. Moreover, Nigg’s appreciation of the map stops short of viewing it in dialogue with regional terrestrial maps or the relations between the map and medieval precedents. The marine animals copiously pictured in this edition are lavishly examined in the bulk of this volume, and he argues that the former bishop provided a reliable witness, engaged in depicting “actual marine creature[s],” such as the spouting whale (“prister” or ”physeter”), orca, or swordfish, that reflected new standards of describing the natural world. The map attracted multiple readers. Sebastian Münster consulted the map as a source of his Monstra Marina & Terrestria (1544), which provided for Gesner, Aldrovandi, and Rondelet images of creatures from the “often inscrutable depth” off Norway and Iceland (24). Nigg defends his interest in the “decorations to fill empty space” (8), and he repeats citations of its iconography of sea monsters for Münster, Mercator, or Gesner, who praised its horned ocean dwellers, sea serpents, and spouting whales; but he has less to say about the rhetorical deployment of images of giant lobster, sea hogs, or polar bears on ice floes beyond the “fluid nature of [early modern] natural history” (149), save to surmise that “Olaus is thought to have either drawn or selected the figures” (48). He finds it unwarranted to tie many-eyed “sea-swine” to attacks on the region’s heretics as “hogs” (60), or unpack the map as encoding anthropological meanings.

The map to which Olaus had dedicated such attention stands at the odd intersection of the clerical career of an envoy to the papacy and growing interest in the offshore. Olaus greatly expanded Ptolemy’s Mare Congelatum or Mare Germanicum as a copious record of ocean life, but also as an anthropological document. Nigg is silent on relations between the map and Olaus’s life as a religious exile, not speculating on what the map and its gloss told Catholic readers about the removed and newly Lutheran north. The map was reprinted in 1577 in Rome, to be copied as the model for a painted map in the papal palace. How the former archbishop selected a map as a medium to describe an area broken from the Catholic faith demands study. As well as gaining sustained attention as a naturalistic record of animals in unknown seas, it reveals ongoing interest in all things monstrous on the edges of the known world.