Revising his 2005 doctoral dissertation at the European University Institute, near Florence, Cattaneo analyzes how the imago mundi was imagined, represented, and systematized in the context of Venetian civilization and culture that in the middle 15th century was an ecumenical crossroads of men, knowledge, and cultures. His study pivots on the work map that Fra Mauro prepared around 1450 at the Camaldolese monastery where he was a lay member of the religious community. Among his topics are the cosmos of a mid-15th-century monk; readers and readings of Ptolemy's Geography in Venice in the mid-15th century; cultural matrices and narrative structure of the map; at the origin of the map market in 15th-century Venice, Florence, and Barcelona and the confluence of politics with scholarship. Distributed in North America by The David Brown Book Co. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)