The Melancholy Mapmaker

The article discusses some Latin sentences written on the back of a nautical chart made by Dionysus Paulusz. van Husum, a little-know Dutch cartographer, in about 1660–1671. The sentences, which resemble entries in a commonplace book, offer a grim view of the state of Christianity in the world, and also of the cartographer’s own life. A study of the sources of these sentences reveals that some of them were taken from works about death. Death was a common theme of seventeenth-century piety, but content of the phrases, their sources, and contextual details suggest that Van Husum was melancholic at the time. The sentences offer a rare insight into the outlook on life of an early modern cartographer.