During the European Renaissance, there were numerous Renaissance men and women who had an impact on changing the known world. In the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries, the world was still yet to be discovered. Two brilliant cartographers, Hartmann Schedel and Sebastian Munster, impacted early Europe by introducing a helpful new innovation: maps. Hartmann Schedel, born on February 13, 1440 in Nuremberg, Germany, was a German physician, humanist, historian, and one of the first cartographers to use the printing press. Schedel first studied in Leipzig from 1456 to 1462, obtaining the degree of Master of Arts. He then followed is teacher, Peter Luder to Padua, Italy to continue his humanistic studies and also to study medicine. While …show more content…
His book, The Cosmographia, from 1544, was the earliest German description of the world. From 1509-1518, he perused his studies first under the versatile humanist Konrad Pellikan and subsequently under the Swabian mathematician Johann Stoffler. From 1509 to 1514, at the monstastery of St. Katherina in Hebrew and Greek, cosmography and mathematics, in fact almost the whole range of studies to which his mature life was dedicated. From 1514 or 1515, as Stoffler's student at Tubingen, Munster broadened his knowledge of mathematical geography and cartography; this was Stoffler's special field of interest, and he had himself written a commentary on Ptolemy's Geographia. In 1540, Munster's edition of Ptolemy appeared, illustrated with 48 woodcut maps, the standard Ptolemaic corpus supplemented by a number of new maps, of great significance for the mapping of Europe. Having completed the Geographia, Munster returned to his pet project, the description of Germany. In 1544, he published the first edition of the Cosmographia, a summary both of Munster's own geographical researches and those of his many