Inventio Fortunata: The book about a fantastic medieval Arctic

Abstract

The following article consists of an exhaustive review of cartography, bibliography, and academic journals on the topic related to the book named Inventio Fortunata. A lost 14th-century book attributed to a Franciscan friar. The work would have described stories about regions at the North Pole, one of them with pygmy people and a magnetic rock at the center of four difficult-to-navigate streams. This first part explores the origins of the book and its elements, its first mentions, as well as its inclusion in a first strip of maps of the time.