Old Map of Munster, Ireland in 1665 by Joan Blaeu - County Cork, Clare, Kerry, Limerick, Tipperary
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Munster appears on this 1665 map under its Latin name, Momonia, a label typical of the classical polish that the Amsterdam publisher Joan Blaeu brought to his Atlas Novus, a work that by its completion in the mid-1660s ran to some six hundred maps and thousands of pages of accompanying text. Blaeu, who had taken over his father Willem's celebrated workshop and served as official cartographer to the Dutch East India Company, never travelled to Ireland himself, and his county maps of the country were engraved from manuscript surveys sent across the North Sea rather than from any personal fieldwork.
The map covers Ireland's south-western province in full, taking in County Cork along the southern coast, Clare and Kerry to the west, and Limerick and Tipperary inland, a stretch of country dominated by mountain ranges, river valleys and a deeply indented Atlantic coastline. Blaeu's engravers rendered this landscape with the decorative flourishes typical of the Dutch Golden Age atlas trade, including an ornamental title cartouche, a compass rose and a scale bar, alongside the coastal soundings and settlement detail that made these maps genuinely useful to the sailors and merchants who bought them.
Volume six of the Atlas Novus, devoted to Scotland and Ireland, remains among the most sought-after sections of Blaeu's work today, and this sheet makes a natural gift for anyone with Cork, Clare, Kerry, Limerick or Tipperary roots, or a collector already working through Blaeu's Irish county set. We reproduce this Munster sheet unframed and at high resolution across our full range of sizes.
