Heinrich Scherer

Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps – Antique Maps By Heinrich Scherer:

Heinrich Scherer (1628-1704)  was a Professor of Hebrew, Mathematics and Ethics at the University of Dillingen until about 1680. Thereafter he obtained important positions as Official Tutor to the Royal Princes of Mantua and Bavaria. It was during his time in Munich as Tutor to the Princely house of Bavaria that his lifetime’s work as a cartographer received acclaim and recognition.

Scherer’s  Atlas Novus, first published in Munich between 1702 and 1710 and reissued in a second edition between 1730 and 1737 was a revolutionary work in terms of the development of European mapmaking at the beginning of the 18th Century.

Heinrich Scherer – University of Missouri:

Heinrich Scherer was a Jesuit priest and polymath, teaching university courses in grammar, philosophy, rhetoric, ethics, mathematics, and Hebrew. His life’s work was the Atlas Novus, completed shortly before his death. It was a seven-volume guidebook to geography, containing maps more to illustrate the text than the other way around. It includes all contemporary knowledge on the subject, but remains highly bound to Church doctrine: Copernicus and Kepler are not acknowledged, for instance, and when in doubt he would present the views of various scholars without contributing his own if it risked contradicting the Church. Religious themes dominate many aspects of the atlas: he notes down ancient bishoprics and missionary locations; non-Catholic territories are marked with dark shading; and a section is dedicated to holy sites associated with the Virgin Mary. These religious themes make the Atlas Novus one of the first printed compilations of thematic maps. The Atlas Novus additionally provides world maps from the perspective of the poles, world maps that place east Asia rather than Europe in the center, and world maps that anticipate Rigobert Bonne’s heart-shaped projections about twenty years later.

An excerpt from, “French Jesuit Mapmaking in North America” Stanford University:

As Louis XIV and Jean-Baptiste Colbert were building up the French state on one side of the Atlantic, French missionaries and fur traders spread outwards across North America on the other side seeking souls and profit. Information from these geographical explorations fed state-sponsored cartographers in Paris, where the Crown was eager to illustrate its growing imperial power. This case explores the mapmaking activities of French Jesuit missionaries in North America in the second half of the seventeenth century.

The Society of Jesus was an integral agent in French colonization. Their ability to adapt local languages and customs made them useful collaborative partners for fur traders and explorers. The Jesuit father Jacques Marquette, for example, helped lead the first European expedition down the Mississippi River in 1673 with explorer Louis Jolliet. Moreover, the Society provided valuable cartographic services to imperial institutions. Navigation and hydrography were key fields for colonization, and the order excelled at both. The Jesuits ran a hydrographic school in Quebec, where professorships were exclusively reserved for them. Back in France proper, the Crown supported two royal hydrographers in Marseilles from 1685 on, both of whom were Jesuits.