Chet Van Duzer follows up his popular and scholarly work Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps with this text on the 1550 world map by Pierre Desceliers for Henry II of France. On its face this work will likely appeal to a more particular audience. His previous work was described by one reader as a coffee-table book, and while those merely interested in the look of maps will be drawn to this work if only for the images (which are stunning), it is much more than a pretty display book. For those near obsessed with maps, why and how they were created or produced, to what patrons or audiences the maps were directed, and what they can tell us about the world in which they operated, the possession of this work is a must.

At 11 x 14.5 inches, the book is nearly twice the size of most texts, yet not only better accommodates the images of some early portolans, but also sixteenth-century maps contemporary to that of Desceliers’s as well as details of his work and that of others. Van Duzer identifies his work as a systematic study of the 1550 world map and begins with sections providing the cartographic context of the map—i.e., the making of medieval maps or those of the mixed portolan tradition with a Ptolemaic framework, in particular by those mapmakers of the Dieppe School (or the Norman School) of cartography, as well as a section on Desceliers’s patron Henry II and his interest in maps. The remainder of the main body of the text is on Pierre Desceliers and four of his maps, including the topic of this work, the 1550 world map. One of the two final sections addresses the appearance of the Southern Continent on these maps, and Van Duzer suggests that theories of the prediscovery of Australia, though exciting and even romantic, should be greeted with skepticism.

The remaining 100 pages and the heart of Van Duzer’s research effort is a detailed analysis of the map facsimile, which is divided into forty-two sections (seven columns by six rows) to better guide the reader through his commentary. The appendix is devoted to the twenty-six long descriptive texts (or legends) found dispersed mostly within the land masses, including several in the mysterious Southern Continent. Van Duzer’s research found that Desceliers’s legends were “the fruit of book study” and drawn primarily from two sources: Jean Petit’s 1532 edition of the Novus Orbis and an edition of Ptolemy’s Geography (162). Unique to this Norman mapmaker is the attention given to Asia and hence the majority of text descriptions (nineteen out of twenty-six) are found in Asia and Southeast Asia, including descriptions of dog-headed cannibals. The presentation of the legends is organized by continental regions beginning with North America—including a curiously placed legend noting the battle between pygmies and cranes, though no mention of the two unicorns nearby—and ending with Southeast Asia. For each legend, the author provides the reader with its location according to the forty-two sections of the facsimile, a transcription, a translation, and a commentary that provides an analysis of the sources used to create the descriptive text.

Van Duzer’s stated purpose for writing the work is to bring a detailed analysis of this highly regarded manuscript map to a map-loving audience. The manuscript maps of the Norman School were of two varieties: the quotidian works that served the local pilots and as such were unlikely to survive their heavy use, and large, highly decorated works, some of which survived because of their sumptuous imagery. As these often-commissioned manuscript maps did not enjoy wide dissemination, neither did the traditions of this school, an appreciation of which Van Duzer hopes to spark. This study not only joins the other works by Van Duzer, but also the recent works of Sarah Toulouse and Gayle Brunelle, among others. While as a reader I would have wished to see a list of figures (there are over seventy) and a bibliography, this work is such a delight that I cannot end the review on a negative. Van Duzer has provided his audience with a scholarly presentation that will generate more work in the field and perhaps bring along a popular audience to such well-researched endeavors.