Gabriel Bucelin

Gabriel Bucelin (1599–1681) was a Swiss Benedictine monk, historian, and cartographer born in Buchen, near Lake Constance. He entered the Benedictine abbey of Weingarten and devoted his career to scholarship, producing works on genealogy, church history, and geography. His interest in maps and heraldry led him to compile detailed collections that documented noble families, monastic institutions, and territorial divisions of the Holy Roman Empire. Though a cleric by vocation, Bucelin’s scholarly pursuits placed him in contact with other European historians and mapmakers of the seventeenth century.

Among his best-known works are the atlas Praecipuarum Universi Terrarum Orbis (1658) and his genealogical tables, both of which combined historical commentary with cartographic representation. In this atlas he included maps of European regions as well as a small map of Japan, Japoniae Descriptio, reflecting his reliance on contemporary sources and the broadening of European geographic knowledge. Bucelin’s works circulated in manuscript and printed form, valued for their detailed record of local and global history at a time of political and religious change in the Holy Roman Empire. He died at Weingarten in 1681, leaving a legacy that bridged monastic scholarship with early modern cartography.