![]() The work of Ortelius and his peers, notably Mercator, represent early attempts to reckon with Europe’s contact with the Americas and Asia and portray the world as it actually was. Nevertheless, by the late 16th century the flow of new geographical information from explorers, particularly in the New World, had rendered many of Ptolemy's observations obsolete. The coordinates provided by Ptolemy, from which world maps were constructed, helped to undermine the medieval academic outlook and put scholarly cartography on a more scientific basis. Medieval geography was defined by a split between the religious Scholastics, whose view of the world was highly abstract and shaped by theological constructs, and the practical activity of the Mediterranean chart makers, whose portolano charts provided detailed records of the coastlines actually visited and surveyed by mariners. The Ptolemaic influence had itself marked an advance in academic cartography. In particular, Ortelius departed substantially from the standard work on the subject, Ptolemy’s Geography, a classical masterwork well out of date by the 16th century. Ortelius’s atlas was remarkably modern, not only because its maps were closer to modern conceptions but because of its uniform publishing format, critical selection from the existing mass of material, and rigorous scholarly citation of the authorities whose maps were used (87 in all).
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