Viewing this map, which is generally considered to be the earliest existing map of the African continent, it is difficult not to become fixated on the large, one-eyed figure seated in the centre. For a sixteenth-century European audience, textual and visual descriptions of ‘monstrous races’ would have been familiar from works by ancient scholars, like Strabo (64–24 BCE) and Pliny the Elder (23–79) and newly published cosmographies, natural histories, and world chronicles, like The Nuremberg Chronicle (1493). While myths of the Monoculi, meaning ‘one eye’, shift between sources, they are consistently characterized as one-eyed, cave-dwelling, savage giants.

Münster exaggerates the features of the one-eyed figure in order to make it clear to the viewer that the Monoculi were unruly giants with physical and behavioral traits distinctly different from humans. The figure appears colossal in comparison with the trees, mountains, and elephant. While Münster exaggerated the figure’s ‘unnaturalness’, he gives it distinctly human features too. The figure blurs physical traits of monstrosity and humanness, echoing European anxieties about what it meant to be human in the wake of encounters with different cultures and bodies. Were the Monoculi human? Or, were they monsters, or maybe hybrids?  Were they fundamentally different from humans? Were there whole populations of people with monstrous traits, or were there only individual instances of monstrous bodies? Münster’s map does not offer direct answers for these, but that the Monoculus is naked and seated with black shackles around its ankles suggests that because of their differences, Europeans believed them to be an inferior race.

A telling example of shifting definitions of humanness in a world of increasing diversity, the map also reveals that such concepts were intricately tied to expanding geographical knowledge. Mythical tribes were most often found occupying the edges of the world map, and thus at the edges of worldly knowledge. Both medieval mappaemundi and Ptolemaic maps typically show only half of the African continent, as it was believed impossible to travel beyond the torrid zone of the equator. The Monoculus, which is pictured centrally in Münster’s map, would have once occupied a positioned along the periphery of the world’s image. As previously unknown lands became more familiar through exploration, Claudius Ptolemy’s long-standing picture of the world was rendered insufficient. Münster’s map is revealing of the destabilization and reassessment of classical paradigms of knowledge in the early modern period.  It illustrates that redefining the world geographically demanded reconsideration of Europe’s place within it, and thus a reinventing of what constituted humanness.

Danielle Gravon, University of Manchester