Rare Atlas Owned By Queen Mary I Heads To Market-With $1.6 Million Price Tag

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Queen Mary I's Map-Filled“Anglica Historia” Atlas to Appear at New York Antiquarian Book Fair for $1.6 Million

A rare Tudor-era volume with royal provenance and a modern-day travel restriction is set to be one of the most closely watched offerings at this year's New York Antiquarian Book Fair. Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc., the San Diego-based dealer specializing in antique maps and works on paper, will present a roughly 460-year-old copy of Polydore Vergil's“Anglica Historia” that once belonged to Queen Mary I, the first woman to rule England.

Priced at $1.6 million, the book is being positioned as an exceptional survival of 16th-century intellectual culture. Yet the most immediate complication for any prospective buyer is legal rather than scholarly: the atlas is under an export ban, meaning it must remain in the U.K. or be made available for acquisition by a British institution.

The volume is a copy of Vergil's“Anglicae Historae,” a sweeping account of English history written by the Italian priest Polydore Vergil (c. 1470–1555), who spent much of his career in England. Vergil issued three editions of the work: the first in 1534, the second in 1546, and a third in 1555 that expanded the narrative to include more recent events, including the reign of King Henry VIII.

Dozens of copies of that 1555 edition were printed in Basel. What distinguishes Mary I's copy, according to the dealer, is that it contains maps found in no other known example. Alex Clausen, the firm's president, has said that even pristine copies of comparable atlases without the maps might sell for only $5,000 to $10,000.

Those maps are central to the book's historical argument and its market value. The dealer describes them as the earliest known separate depictions of the U.K. and related locales, a presentation that treats territories as discrete subjects rather than as components of a single unified whole. In the dealer's reading, that conceptual shift hints at an emerging idea of incremental expansion, a cartographic mindset that would later align with British imperial ambitions. The maps' unusually fine detail is also framed as evidence of England's defensive preoccupations in the decades leading up to the Spanish Armada.

The object's physical presence is equally part of the pitch. The exterior features Queen Mary I's monogrammed coat of arms, surrounded by elaborate gilding attributed to the so-called Medallion Binder, an unidentified craftsperson associated with richly decorated bindings. The combination of regal ownership and devotional-era splendor is especially resonant given Mary's reputation as a staunchly Catholic monarch.

Ruderman acquired the atlas at auction two years ago for $227,000, a dramatic leap above its high estimate of £20,000 (about $40,059). Clausen has said the firm expected to pay substantially more, and he attributes the current price in part to what he calls an“intellectual value-add” produced through provenance research.

That research, he says, has traced the book's ownership back to Sir John Fortelescue, described as a second cousin of Mary I's successor and half sister, Elizabeth I. Fortelescue taught Elizabeth Latin and later oversaw her library, distributing manuscripts after her death to figures who would help form the foundations of major British collections, including the British Library and Oxford's Bodleian Library.

The maps themselves remain something of an open question. While the dealer notes stylistic clues that suggest a maker who may have arrived in England from the Netherlands or Spain and adapted quickly, the cartographer's identity has not been established.

The New York Antiquarian Book Fair will take place at Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Ave, New York, from April 3 to May 3. For collectors, institutions, and historians alike, the offering presents a familiar art-market paradox: a singular object whose value is amplified by mobility and visibility, even as its future is constrained by the requirement that it stay within Britain's borders - or return to a public collection there.

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