<p style='text-align: justify;'>The <i>Margarita philosophica</i> was a compendium, or 'Epitome' of university learning in the sixteenth century. It was written by the prior of the house of Carthusians at Freiburg, Gregor Reisch (d. 1525), and was first published in 1503 in Freiburg by Johannes Schott, a printer from Strasbourg. The work was illustrated amply with somewhat crude woodcuts, and was divided into twelve books, with one book each dealing with the trivium (grammar, dialectic and rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy), four books devoted to natural philosophy, and one book on moral philosophy. It was a popular work, reprinted numerous times during the sixteenth century, including the unauthorized, augmented editions by another printer at Strasbourg, Johann Grueninger. Oronce Fine edited and added to the Latin text of the 1535 edition. In the 1512 edition, Grueninger attached an appendix consisting of material not discussed extensively in the original Schott edition. This appendix included Greek and Hebrew alphabets, musical notation, perspective and architecture, and explanation of such instruments as the quadrant, astrolabe, and torquetum. From the beginning, the <i>Margarita philosophica</i> included in the book of astronomy a folding map of the World, which is often missing in surviving copies. Grueninger's version of the Ptolemaic map differs slightly from the original in the Schott edition in that it only shows four, instead of the twelve, winds of the World. The names of the four principal winds are given as follows: <i>Septentrio</i> and <i>Aparctias</i> (north); <i>Subsolanus</i> (east); <i>Auster</i> or <i>Notus</i> (south); <i>Favonius</i> or <i>Zephyrus</i> (west). At the middle of the left edge is inscribed 'Fortunate Islands', the starting point of Ptolemaic co-ordinates. In the middle of Africa, just under the equator, is written: 'here are found white elephants, rhinoceroses and tigers'. At the bottom of the map, across the land bridge that Ptolemy said connected southern Africa and southern Asia, the inscription reads: 'here, there is not land but sea, in which [are] islands of great size, though they were unknown to Ptolemy'. Though the New World had been discovered in 1492, and Martin Waldseemueller's woodcut map showing a new continent named 'America' had been published by 1507, it was not until Grueninger's 1515 edition that the new discovery was incorporated into <i>Margarita philosophica's </i>map.</p>
