The British Isles from a landmark edition of Ptolemy

A very scarce map of the British Isles, issued in only the third edition of Ptolemy's Geography to have printed maps, the first to be printed in the vernacular and the first with 'modern' maps'. Francesco Berlinghieri (1440-1501), an Italian scholar and humanist, started work on a revision of Ptolemy in 1464, updating the Ptolemiac maps, supplementing them with modern maps (France, Italy, Spain and the Holy Land) and writing a commentary in Italian verse. The maps were engraved by Niccolò Tedesco, a German printer, unusually equidistant meridians and parallels, and rectangular borders rather than trapezoid. The completed work was published as 'Septe Giornate della Geographia di Francesco Berlinghieri' ('The Seven Days of Geography'). Despite being updated this map still follows Ptolemy's system of geography of c. AD100, with Scotland orientated to the east rather than north and Ireland too high.