Originally written in Greek around AD 150 at the great Hellenistic centre of learning, Alexandria, Ptolemy's Cosmographia or Geography is an atlas that compiled the entire geographic knowledge of the Roman Empire at its height. It was a revision of the now-lost atlas of the first-century Graeco-Phoenician geographer Marinus of Tyre. The Cosmographia became an influential text for Byzantine and Islamic scholars.

The Latin translation in this edition was authored by Iacopo di Angelo da Scarperia, a late medieval scholar whose humanistic inclination had been nurtured by Florentine chancellor Coluccio Salutati. During 1395-96 Iacopo visited Constantinople where he began his Greek studies. After years of training, he dedicated himself to translating ancient Greek writers, and his version of Ptolemy's work became one of the most popular in the Renaissance. Unlike his teacher Manuel Chrysoloras, whose unfinished translation of the same work retained the title Geographia, Iacopo opted to use Cosmographia to emphasise the cosmological nature of Ptolemy's work, believing that the discussion on the relationship between the heavens and earth was at the heart of its contribution.

Over time, geographers added new maps to the work, with those of the German cartographer Nicolaus Germanus (c.1420–c.1490) being the most notable. Germanus revised his manuscript several times between c.1460 and 1482 adding new maps—his tabulae modernae—that depicted contemporary northern Europe, France, Spain, Italy and Palestine. These manuscripts, written on vellum and richly illuminated, were produced for distinguished patrons. In 1471, Germanus presented his employer, Pope Paul II, with a deluxe manuscript (now Vatican Library, MS Urb. Lat. 274), which was taken to Ulm and used as the model for this 1482 edition of the Cosmographia, the first to be printed north of the Alps. It made use of Germanus’ second revision (c.1466–68), which included a now-lost map of Scandinavia, Iceland and Greenland as charted by the fourteenth-century Danish geographer Claudius Clavus. It was also the first edition of the atlas to be sold coloured.

Binding description
Twentieth-century(?) full leather goat skin. Covers decorated with blind fillet to form a border. Spine with four raised bands and retained Kloss labels; two coloured headbands; textblock re-garded and sewn.