Pieter van den Keere

Pieter van den Keere was a Dutch engraver, publisher and globe maker. He was born in Ghent in 1571, and in 1584 moved with his family for religious reasons to London. His sister, Collette, married Jodocus Hondius from whom van den Keere received training as an engraver. In 1593, both of them settled in Amsterdam.

In the course of a long working life he engraved a large number of individual maps for prominent cartographers of the day. He worked with Willem Barents Petrus Bertius, Cornelis Claesz, Petrus Plancius, the House of Visscher, and Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer. One of his earliest work was a map of Ireland, Hyberniae novissima description, which was published by Hondius and served as a model for later editions of the Theatrum of Abraham Ortelius. He also contributed to John Norden's Speculum Britanniae of 1593.

He is probably best known for the work he done in about 1599 when he engraved plates for 44 maps of the English and Welsh counties, the regions of Scotland and the Irish provinces. They were published in 1617 in a Latin edition of the Britannia of William Camden, by Willem Blaeu. At one point, the plates came into the possession of John Speed's publisher, George Humble, who in 1627, the year in which he published a major edition of Speed's Atlas, also issued the Keere maps as a pocket edition. Humble used the descriptive texts of the larger Speed maps and thereafter they were known as Miniature Speeds. The publication was very popular and further reissues were made up to 1676.