Reading the Natural World

Horologiographia, by the sixteenth-century German scholar Sebastian Münster, is a practical guide to the design and construction of sundials. It was celebrated both for the accuracy of Münster’s calculations and for the beauty of the woodcut illustrations, some of them attributed to Hans Holbein the Younger. Smith has written ‘inscriptio zodiacii’ in the margin, noting that Münster uses zodiac symbols to indicate the month of the year. The seventeenth-century sundial in Old Court uses this same design. Münster’s Cosmographia was the first German-language description of the world. It was one of the most popular works of Smith’s era – here is his own copy - and thirty-five editions were produced within a century of its publication.

Author: Sebastian Münster
Title: Horologiographia [On the measurement of time] (Basel, 1533)
Shelfmark: D.20.39 (catalogue record)

D.20.39