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The World of Gerard Mercator: The Mapmaker Who Revolutionized Geography

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The history of maps seems to be an understudied element of history. Yet it had political, economical and religous ramifications and influences.

If you stand in a classroom and look at a map chances are you are looking at a map of which its basic ideas were theorized by Gerard Mercator, a Flemmish born mapmaker who spend most of his life in Duisburg.

In the first chapters we read about his predecessors and influences that made him into the most important cartographer up to this day. It's a book about his personal life, his political life, his economical life and also his religious life.

By challenging some of the basic ideas of the Church, based in part on the ancient Greek Ptolemy, his maps could be seen as heretic. He was jailed for a while but got away with it. He keeps working on new maps, but is constantly haunted by a question: how to draw a 2D map of a spherical 3D world. He eventually came to some conclusion by shortening the lines nearer to the poles; this was both a better way of representation than before, but nowadays somewhat seen as eurocentric, since it makes Europe seem bigger than it really was.

This book is great. Written in simple language so everyone will enjoy it. The author has taken great care into mentioning the political and religious reasonings on mapmaking and also why certain maps look like they do. It's a great book for any lover of ancient maps.

"The world of Gerard Mercator" is a gem of a book. The author skillfully presents the reader with an extraordinary time in the past that would change the future. This was a time of religious confrontations in Europe coinciding with the making of accurate maps of a quickly expanding world. The legacy of Mercator is still present with us today in the way maps are made. This book contains all the best attributes of a scholarly work, i.e. competent research of primary sources, good maps, illustrations and clear writing. In addition, the author displays the rare gift of being able to share his extraordinary insights into the life and times of Mercator with a general audience. The book makes an easy and extremely enjoyable read. After reading it you will never look at a world map the same way; you will be compelled to scan the map and look for the words, which go unnoticed by most people: "Mercator Projection". I highly recommend this book.

I had reservations about how exciting the life of a mapmaker who never left Europe could be, but I was pleasantly surprised with how readable and interesting Taylor makes Mercator's life. As a student of religion, my only complaint is how one-sided Taylor presents the religious conflicts in the book. Many of the statistics cited about the suppression of religious freedom by execution by the inquisition have been shown in recent decades to be grossly exaggerated by Protestant reported with a decidedly biased point of view. Taylor admits this, but only once, and rather late in the book. In the point of view of the book, anyone connected to the Catholic church is presented as a Luddite stuck in the past, while anyone connected to the reformation was progressive and forward-thinking. The reality was not so black and white. Even with these small caveats, I highly recommend this book to anyone wondering about how mapmaking has evolved since medieval times.