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3w ago

Cambridge Study: First In‑Bible Map Was Printed Backwards and Helped Normalize Borders

The research traces how a flipped Holy Land woodcut in a Zurich Old Testament fostered literal readings and fed early‑modern notions of territorial frontiers.

Professor Nathan MacDonald with Christopher Froschauer's 1525 Old Testament open at Lucas Cranach the Elder’s map of the Holy Land, in the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge (Credit: University of Cambridge)
Image
(Image Source: The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge)

Overview

  • Nathan MacDonald’s study in The Journal of Theological Studies identifies a 1525 Old Testament printed by Christoph Froschauer as the first Bible to include a map, drawn by Lucas Cranach the Elder.
  • The woodcut was inadvertently reversed, placing the Mediterranean east of Palestine, an error that went unnoticed in the workshop yet became highly influential.
  • The paper argues that as such maps spread in Protestant vernacular Bibles, readers began to treat lines dividing the twelve tribes as fixed boundaries, shaping early ideas of sovereign states.
  • Cranach’s hybrid map blends symbolic medieval conventions with emerging Ptolemaic techniques and depicts a Europeanized Holy Land, aiding ‘virtual pilgrimage’ and more literal, place‑based readings of scripture.
  • Surviving copies are scarce, including one at Trinity College Cambridge’s Wren Library, and the study cautions that biblical imagery still informs border politics, citing a recent U.S. border agency recruitment film.