Abstract This chapter investigates the relationship between water and the earth and the world's landmasses and waterways described and depicted in fifteenth-and sixteenth-century cosmographical and geographical texts and their medieval predecessors. This chapter argues that many medieval authors claimed that there was more water than earth in the world and that this water was located especially in the southern hemisphere of the world, exposing the ecumene in the northern hemisphere. Sixteenthcentury authors of such texts argued for more land than water in the world and proposed different spatial relationships between waterways and landmasses than their predecessors had, but the maps that accompanied their texts show that they still tended to depict the southern hemisphere as especially water filled.

Keywords: Crates of Mallus; world maps; Antipodes; Sebastian Munster; Marco Polo; sea monsters

But in regard to the story of the Antipodes, that is, that there are men on the other side of the earth where the sun rises when it sets for us, who plant their footprints opposite ours, there is no logical ground for believing this. Its authors do not claim that they have learned it from any historical evidence, but offer it as a sort of logical hypothesis. Their theory is that the earth hangs suspended within the heavenly sphere, so that the lowest and middle points of the world are one and the same. From this they conjecture that the other half of the earth, which lies beneath our portion, cannot lack human occupants. They fail to observe that even if the world is held to be global or rounded in shape, or if some process of reasoning should prove this to be the case, it would still not necessarily follow that the land on the opposite side is not covered by masses of water. Furthermore, even if the land there be exposed, we must not jump to the conclusion that it has human inhabitants. For there is absolutely no falsehood in the Scripture, which gains credence for its account of past events by the fact that its prophecies are fulfilled. And the idea is too absurd to mention that some men might have sailed from our part of the earth to the other and have arrived there by crossing the boundless tracts of ocean, so that the human race might be established there also by descent from the one first man.