Damn, you guys are good. Huge thanks to all, especially Mycroft Holmes for the modernisation and translation.
A few more comments/replies to questions:
-No watermark. The paper is quite thin. Pardon my complete ignorance of this sort of thing, but what’s “laid paper”?
-It was a mere A$20, or about US$16. I was buying a couple of maps, and only got this page because it looked nice, and lonely.
-The hand colouring does look sort of amateurish, doesn’t it? Like I said, ‘late hand-colouring’ was the only note that came with the page, while most of the other maps and prints being sold by the bookstore had much more detailed information.
-Mid to late 1500s is earlier than I expected. Cool.
-I’ll check it when I get home tonight, but I don’t recall the pictures or words being significantly indented into the page. Like I said though, it’s thin paper, and if it really is 450-odd years old, is it possible the indentations would have flattened out?
I was interested to see that some of the grammatical inflections seem to have been omitted. For instance, shouldn’t it have been Pisa–eine grosse Statt and Das andere Buch? I find it hard to believe that German of the 18th century was less inflected that that of today, so, was it ever customary to omit inflections in writing even though they were grammatically required?
Well, if the original text was really written in the early to mid 16th century, you have to remember that this was only shortly after Martin Luther published his German translation of the bible (1522) and thus created modern “Hochdeutsch” (high German). The entire text reads as if it was written in a dialect, and I would guess a southern German dialect if you asked me. The reason I would guess southern German is the lack of inflection you mention, along with phrases and words like:
“Was alter gebeüw do seind gewesen”; “Sie gehert zu unsern zeyten under das Herzogthumb Meyland”; “Seind sie von den Bepsten vertriben worden”
Words like “do” for “da”, “under” for “unter”, and “Bepsten” for “Päbsten”, seem to point to either a Franconian or Bavarian dialect. If it is Franconian, the text was probably written in Nürnberg, Würzburg or Bamberg originally. If it is Bavarian, it was probably written in München, Landshut, Freising, Regensburg or Passau.
Huge thanks to all, especially Mycroft Holmes for the modernisation and translation.