Conventional Wisdom and the Date of the Kunstmann I Chart

It has long been accepted by most historians that the manuscript chart on parchment known as “Kunstmann I,” signed by the famous Portuguese cartographer Pedro Reinel, was made about 1504. The purpose of the present paper is to advocate c. 1519 as a more likely date for the composition of the Kunstma...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization
Main Author: McIntosh, Gregory
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) 2020
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Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/cart-2019-0005
https://utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/cart-2019-0005
Description
Summary:It has long been accepted by most historians that the manuscript chart on parchment known as “Kunstmann I,” signed by the famous Portuguese cartographer Pedro Reinel, was made about 1504. The purpose of the present paper is to advocate c. 1519 as a more likely date for the composition of the Kunstmann I chart. It will be seen that the original pronouncements of past historians for the earlier date were made before other documents found later in the nineteenth century shed light upon the Portuguese voyages to Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. Repeated by subsequent historians, the dating of c. 1504 become enshrined as conventional wisdom.