Abstract
A collective Czech monograph with rich picture and map accompaniment is dedicated to the Czech cartographic history. The book presents, in 12 chapters, the life and the work of Pavel Aretin of Ehrenfeld, whose map New and exact description of the Kingdom of Bohemia (1619, 1632, 1665, before 1747) was published exactly 400 years ago.
It also describes another edition of the Wussin publishing house in Prague. The cartographic work captures for the first time the boundaries of 15 provincial regions with their Czech and German names.
The scale of the map was already more detailed, 1: 504 000, than at the previous ones. Aretin also described many more settlements, over 1,200.
The author added a local alphabetic index with latitude and longitude coordinates in Czech miles on the edge of the 2nd edition of the map, which has been preserved only in the Map Collection of the Faculty of Science, Charles University. Due to the war use of the map, very few copies have been preserved.
The original 1st and 3rd edition are owned by National Archives, the 2nd and the 4th edition belong to the fund of the Map Collection of the Faculty of Science, Charles University. The authors identify and compare here toponyms from the registers of all editions for the first time.
This confirms the hypothesis that the 1st edition of the map must have already had the index. In addition to the toponym list the map also contains pictorial decorations in the form of period figures representing social groups in Bohemia in the early 17th century.
Regional Archives in Opava also provided a unique Aretin's manuscript map of Zábřeh Manor (1623) that is also described. Content and cartometric analyses were carried out on the maps.
There are also introduced unique sister maps by W. P.
Zimmermann (1619) from the British Library and by E. Sadeler from the Map Collection of the Faculty of Science, Charles University (1620).
A separate chapter is dedicated to the responses to the work in European atlases and in map historic works, especially from the Map Collection of the Faculty of Science, Charles University. The introductory chapter places the cartographic work within the framework of a turbulent period of The Thirty Years' War, starting with the defenestration (1618), through the Battle of White Mountain to the sack of Prague by the Swedes in 1648.
The last chapter deals with period gauges and measuring instruments. Copies of the maps of Aretin, Zimmermann and Sadeler are annexed.
The topographical tables with 9, 600 historic toponyma of the Czech Lands are particularly unique, supplemented by identification of current geographical name and also by number of the period map mark. They thus create a valuable set to understand the settlement and economic development of Bohemia in the 17th century.
The book follows the research of K. Kuchař and F.
Roubík in the edition Monumenta Cartographica Bohemiae but it brings a number of its own new yet unpublished results.